It took me several weeks (first time and early adopter penalties) to get F6 running on my HP DV7000 laptop. Video, touchpad and especially wireless on broadcom were all issues. I never did get F7 wireless running. I gave up on wireless after a week or so, all posted methods failed miserably, and sadly wiped F7 off my system. So I switched to Ubumtu 6/7 with good results. I especially enjoyed the Synaptic software installer. After reading this post, I went on to read the release notes for F8 and decided to give it a try. It took a couple hours to get everything going. The system correctly loaded the bc4 module but I still had to use fwcutter for the broadcom microcode but thats really a BroadCom issue and not F8's. wpa_supplicant was installed by default but not wpa_supplicant-gui for some reason. NetworkManager actually worked and it was a done deal. Power management seems much improved from F6/7 and suspend almost works, someday NetManager will be able to restart wireless by its self on a suspend. So I have F8 running as well as Ubuntu 7 but have better security with selinux enforcing etc. Even though it still took a bit more tech savvy than an average computer user might have, I'd say that F8 is a contender again and good job to the Fedora teams and keep it up!
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It took me several weeks (first time and early adopter penalties) to get F6 running on my HP DV7000 laptop. Video, touchpad and especially wireless on broadcom were all issues. I never did get F7 wireless running. I gave up on wireless after a week or so, all posted methods failed miserably, and sadly wiped F7 off my system. So I switched to Ubumtu 6/7 with good results. I especially enjoyed the Synaptic software installer. After reading this post, I went on to read the release notes for F8 and decided to give it a try. It took a couple hours to get everything going. The system correctly loaded the bc4 module but I still had to use fwcutter for the broadcom microcode but thats really a BroadCom issue and not F8's. wpa_supplicant was installed by default but not wpa_supplicant-gui for some reason. NetworkManager actually worked and it was a done deal. Power management seems much improved from F6/7 and suspend almost works, someday NetManager will be able to restart wireless by its self on a suspend. So I have F8 running as well as Ubuntu 7 but have better security with selinux enforcing etc. Even though it still took a bit more tech savvy than an average computer user might have, I'd say that F8 is a contender again and good job to the Fedora teams and keep it up!