Fedora Core 5 install woes
I’ve done a few installations of FC5 now, including one laptop. Most have gone smoothly. The most recent machine, though, had a NVidia graphics card (FX5200 to be precise). Woe. The installer hangs when trying to format the disk partitions. Googling, it turns out to be a fairly common problem, but none of the suggested remedies (using text mode, etc) worked for me. In the end, I installed FC4 on the machine, since the FC4 version of Anaconda is less smart about detecting and optimising for the graphics subsystem. FC4 installed fine, so then I tried to use the FC5 disks to upgrade the installation. More woe. This time, Anaconda itself crashed with a python script error, also a problem that other people have seen. In the end, doing the upgrade over the internet using yum went very smoothly, following these instructions. The end-to-end process, though, was frustrating and slow.
Fedora is a good distro: I tried, and abandoned, Ubuntu in favour of Fedora Core. But their report card should be marked “must try harder” on the QC for the install process.