I am a new Fedora Core 3 user from Mandrake Linux. I just installed Fedora core 3 on my laptop and everything works well after some tweak of my atmel wireless pcmcia card. I feel Fedora is more flexible and open than Mandrake Linux. However, I found some problem adding Gnome wireless signal strength indicator to Gnome taskbar. The CD-ROM icon on the desktop appeared after I inserted a CD but I failed to mouse right click->eject the disk. The eject only umounted the CD-ROM. I figured out why in the terminal that only root can eject the CD-ROM (/dev/hdc) device. Third problem is that Fedora is a little slower than Mandrake. Is that a problem of i386 compiled rpm software including kernel? Mandrake Linux is built by i586 rpms. Overall, Linux Desktop computing is always slower than MS-Windows on i686 machines. One of my friend though the reason is MS-Windows GUI is bound with WIN32 kernel but Linux is not.

Anyone can give me suggestions about the 3 issues above? Thank you.

O just read your issues and only one of them made sense, no offense.....

Basically you pretty much get what you got when it comes to prebuilt distros like suse fedora mandrake etc/somewhat. You could try building most of your packages with rpmbuild specifically for your arch. But then your build enviorment and compilers or what not has to be built suitable to build them the way you want them.

For example, I like slackware that's one distro that actually works good so umm most slack packages are built for 486 right? Well O'll be maybe on an i686 machine so I may want a performance boost I start building my own slack packages for my favorite apps but they'll be 686 packages instead of 486. Make a bit sense? Also rpm based distros tend to include support in alot of packages for stuff ya don't need. So if you want full control you can use gentoo, which IMO leaves everything pretty much up to you or you can go all out and build your own distro with something like Linux from scratch.

Depending on your specs or pc the performance boost can be minimal and it may not even be worth the hassle. But once you get the hang of it it's not a hassle at all, just becomes a few moments of your precious time.

Overall, Linux Desktop computing is always slower than MS-Windows on i686 machines

Not my experience at all. Linux uses hardware far better then Windows ever did on my pc. I get better sound quality, faster response and much better video/3d.
I haven't tried fc3 yet, (quite liked fc2 but ubuntu just leaves them all standing (imo)). Sometimes you need to su to root and unmount the cd before ejecting it and sometimes (in bad cases) only a complete reboot seems to free the drive. There may be command line possibilities to force unmount and eject but I haven't come across them yet.
My experience has been that only root can eject cd's from the command line if the automount/supermount thing goes wrong. This seems to be true for fedora, ubuntu, mandrake, suse, slackware etc.
The other thing about Fedora is it's not 100% meant to be a day to day desktop environment. It's hoped by it's release that developers will add bits and sort it out so the best bits can be put into the next RHE release. For day to day use it would be (arguably) better to go with Mandrake (probably not 10.1 if the reports I'm hearing are anything to go on) or Ubuntu or Suse. Yoper is aimed at i686 systems and is "a bit nippy" but Ubuntu is still the fastest distro I've used bar none.