Slow downloading of updates with Fedora 8
I've noticed recently, that updates for Fedora have been taking ages to download. There is a solution though. Install yum-fastestmirror:
yum install yum-fastestmirror
and you'll be getting your updates nice and fast again. I've just tried this, and found it working a treat.
Some people have experienced that yum-fastestmirror has sometimes connected to slower mirrors instead of picking a faster one. I've not noticed this yet, but it's early days since I've only started using it. You can, then instead install yum-presto.
yum install yum-presto
and then see if it's any better than using yum-fastestmirror. I will update though if I see any problems in the future with yum-fastestmirror.
I've also seen other suggestions for installing smart-gui. This opens more connections than yum or yumex, meaning you can get to download faster this way also. The downside is that you have to configure smart-gui repos manually. Then, it can take a load of disk space with it's ever-increasing cache. If you have loads of disk space, then maybe give it a try. However, I don't like to waste disk space, especially if it's just a cache for a package manager!