My laptop uses the Intel IPW2200 wireless adapter, and this stopped working after the upgrade to F8.

The output of

dmesg | grep ipw

is:

ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 1.2.2kmprq
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: ipw2200-bss.fw request_firmware failed: Reason -2
ipw2200: Unable to load firmware: -2
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:06:05.0 failed with error -5

The problem is caused by the fact that the udev files responsible for loading firmware in Fedora 8 are broken. Apparently, older versions of udev used /sbin/firmware_helper to load firmware
files, but the one in Fedora 8 (and possibly a few versions earlier than that) use /lib/udev/firmware.sh

The fix for the problem is to replace occurrences of /sbin/firmware_helper in udev files where firmware is loaded with /lib/udev/firmware.sh. You can find the affected with

for file in `find /etc/udev/rules.d` ; do grep -iHn firmware $file ; done

This should give you the filenames and the lines where you nee to make any changes. For me, the affected file was /etc/udev/rules.d/06-udev-rh-early.rules, and the change was required on line 12. For completeness, I also put the full path to firmware.sh in the file /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules (i.e. replace firmware.sh with /lib/udev/firmware.sh).

Once this is done, unload the ipw2200 module with

modprobe -r ipw2200

and reload with

modprobe ipw2200

and the adapter should now be detected properly. There's no need to reboot.