I successfully upgraded from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8 on my Dell XPS with an Intel Core duo running at 3 GHZ, with 1.5 GB of RAM. I wanted to share the story, since it might help someone else with the same problems.

I have two DVD drives, one an external LG CD/DVD-RW on a USB port, and the other the internal Phillips CD-RW/DVD-ROM.

First, I downloaded and burned the DVD for Fedora 8 x86_64, since it's a multiprocessor. When I put the DVD in the external drive and rebooted the machine, it read the DVD and displayed the graphical installation options screen. The boot options menu flashed by so fast I couldn't even read it. The first option (default) on the graphical menu was to install or upgrade, so I just hit <enter>. It installed vmlinuz and initrd, then displayed "ready," and stopped. Did the same thing in the internal drive. I tried DVDs for Fedora 8 i686, Fedora 8 x86_64 Live, Fedora 8 i686 Live, Fedora 7 x86_64, a Fedora 8 Live CD, and finally a Fedora 8 boot disk (CD). They all did the same thing: loaded vmlinuz and initrd and stopped with "ready" displayed on the screen. I suspect a timing issue with the high speed processors.

After some investigation, I learned that the script put the boot options menu on the screen for 600 milliseconds, not long enough for me to read and react to. I looked for a way to change the script, but never succeeded.

As a last resort, I put the x86_64 DVD in the internal drive, and when the boot options menu flashed on the screen I quickly typed Ctrl-C. That suspended the installation with the boot options menu on the screen and the "boot:" prompt at the bottom. Just hitting <enter> at that time took me to the graphical options menu, which stopped at "ready." My research had suggested typing "linux mediacheck" at the "boot:" command, so that's what I did. Lo and behold, it started the installation. It ignored the "mediacheck" command, but that came up later. Unfortunately, it then told me that I was upgrading from a 32-bit version to a 64-bit version, and it would probably not be successful. So I went back to square one and used the Fedora 8 i686 version DVD. That worked.

Again unfortunately, when the installation got to the point of checking dependencies, it hung up - a known bug. So I restarted, but at the "boot:" command I entered "linux mediacheck upgrade=http:// . . ." as recommended in the bug report. This time everything went swimmingly. I now have Fedora 8 up and running, and even upgraded that with Software Updater.

Not everything is perfect yet (the sound isn't working correctly), but all the applications seem to work.

I sincerely hope this helps somebody.