Jayson, I might help you now that there are live-CDs already ( http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-Alpha-RC2/Live/i386/ ).
Unfortunately I couldn't make it work from ISO. There was a script I used to patch the initrd but it didn't work with this ISO. It's very slow from the CD (they will certainly improve that as it took a very long time to boot). Note: my hardware is old.
Re. the live-CD itself: - icon theme is set to 'Rodent' but when the desktop came up (BTW, it boots to lightdm login screen) it was showing the GNOME icon theme. - it's set to not show images in the menu (Settings>Appearance). Just saying, I don't know if this is just the default Xfce setup. - particular to my case, auto-mounting worked for me after I don't even know how long ago (it didn't work with F17 live-CDs). I'll check thunar-volman's version in F17 to see if it's because of that but I suspect it's some underlying service that it uses (I have removed thunar-volman from my installed system but I'll try it again). - panel doesn't have neither mixer applet nor clipman applet, but it may fall on that 'default Xfce' rule. - first time I clicked on the 'web browser' launcher it didn't open anything, then I opened the 'preferred applications' to see if it was set and it was (Firefox) then next time the launcher worked. This I suspect was just my system struggling to run the CD.