I am summarising the issues I have had with an F8 install using the DVD iso in a Dell D610 laptop.
1) The install would not boot until a suggestion to add some parameters to the kernel line as per http://smolts.org/wiki/System/Dell_Inc./Latitude_D620 was done. This allowed the install to continue through to a successfull first boot although there were strange kernel messages during boot: The same kernel messages appear in /var/log/messages as "Nov 9 17:37:27 localhost kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason a1 on CPU 0. Nov 9 17:37:27 localhost kernel: You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus. Nov 9 17:37:27 localhost kernel: Dazed and confused, but trying to continue"
Subsequent boots are no different if the parameters mentioned above are used.
2) When I logged into KDE I had multiple kde crash handler messages which came from the sound system. I had to turn off sound altogether in kde control centre although amarok will play just fine. I have reported this at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=373881
3) I can manually start the wpa_supplicant daemon using "service wpa_supplicant start" as root and this gives a good wireless connection with wpa/psk, and I can collect an ip address with dhclient. However I cannot get the wpa_supplicant daemon to start at boot time. I tried the f7 trick of changing the startup sequence number from 12 to 09 in /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant but this made no difference. I could of course add these commands to /etc/rc.local but it would be nice to be able to start the daemon at boot with chkconfig wpa_supplicant on. Once the supplicant has started then the wireless connection is solid and works fine.
Other than these I have not found a problem! However I would have hoped to have had a smoother start to using F8!
If anyone has any suggestions as to a workaround for any of these issues I would be grateful.
I would imagine there are quite a few Dell D610 laptops around so these issues may well be seen by others with this machine.