Fedora 17 Alpha declared GOLD - Try the shell in qemu.

Robyn Bergeron announced: Fedora 17 Alpha release (RC4) was declared GOLD [Source].
This release ships Mesa with llvmpipe (and several other enhancements to allow software rendering), this way gnome-shell can actually be run in a non-accelerated graphics environment - like qemu is.

Just fetch - today or the 28th - an ISO of your flavor (live CDs come in GNOME, KDE, LXDE and XFCE) and run it with qemu:

$ sudo qemu-kvm -smp 2 -m 1024 -net user -net nic \
  -cdrom Fedora-17-Alpha-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso

Sadly qemu's curl support is still broken, otherwise we could just run:

$ sudo qemu-kvm -smp 2 -m 1024 -net user -net nic \ 
  -cdrom "http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/\
17-Alpha.RC4/Live/x86_64/\
Fedora-17-Alpha-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso"