So I installed Fedora 8 a couple of days after release. All in all, it seems pretty solid. Desktop Effects are working much better than they did in F7 (I can run it for days without crashing now; w00t!). Network Manager was fairly easy to set up (though still not as intuitive as I’d like).

The major problem I’ve had is with the Java situation. By default, Fedora 8 comes with IcedTea 1.7, Red Hat’s OpenJDK Java implementation. This would be fine if I weren’t a Java developer who’s essentially locked into Sun’s Java5 for the time being. Tried manually installing it from the .bin file, as I usually do on a fresh install, but for the first time I had mixed results, namely the dreaded “java: xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock’ failed.” error whenever I tried running a Swing app. The culprit appears to be the libXp library, which is incompatible with Sun’s implementation.

Most of our work is server-side, so this isn’t a huge impediment per se. I’ve just been switching back and forth between jre5 and IcedTea depending on what I’m doing. I was getting ready to actually downgrade to Fedora 7 over the Thanksgiving weekend, but luckily I found this forum thread. Here’s what I had to do:

1. In a terminal, cd to my Java directory:
   cd /opt/java/jdk1.5.0_13/jre/lib/i386/
2. As root, run the sed fix that’s floating around, modified a bit. Turns out there’s 3 copies of the file in question:
   locate `pwd`*libmawt.so | xargs sed -i ’s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g’

That was all. Hope I can get some Google hits and help anyone else who’s been struggling.