The Fedora Core installation program has the ability to test the integrity of the installation media. It works with the CD, DVD, hard drive ISO, and NFS ISO installation methods. Red Hat recommends that you test all installation media before starting the installation process, and before reporting any installation-related bugs (many of the bugs reported are actually due to improperly-burned CDs). To use this test, type linux mediacheck at the boot: prompt.

The mediacheck function is highly sensitive, and may report some usable discs as faulty. This result is often caused by disc writing software that does not include padding when creating discs from ISO files. For best results with the mediacheck, boot with the option:

linux ide=nodma

Use the sha1sum utility to verify discs before carrying out an installation. This test accurately identifies discs that are not valid or identical to the ISO image files.

Memory testing may be performed prior to installing Fedora Core by entering memtest86 at the boot: prompt. This causes the Memtest86 standalone memory testing software to run. Memtest86 memory testing continues until the Esc key is pressed.

You must boot from CD-ROM 1 (or a rescue CD-ROM) in order to use this feature.

Fedora Core 5 test2 supports graphical FTP and HTTP installations. However, due to the necessity of containing the installer image in RAM, only systems with more than 128MiB of RAM (or systems booted from CD-ROM 1, which contains the installer image) can use the graphical installer. Systems with 128MiB of RAM or less must continue to use the text-based installer.

Support has been added for yum as the dependancy solver backend for software packages has been added. Additional repositories are expected to be supported during installation in a future release.

In this release, the installer checks the hardware capability and installs either the uniprocessor or SMP (Symmetric Multi Processor) kernel, as appropriate. Previous releases installed both the variants and used the appropriate one as default.

Partition setting has been reworked to be more user friendly.

Remote logging via syslog is supported in this release. To enable, pass syslog=host:port at the boot prompt. Specifying the port is optional.

Firewall/SELinux configuration has been moved to the final installation phase called firstboot.

Rendering of HTML pages during install is now done using the gtkhtml widget for better capability.

Kickstart has been refactored into its own package - pykickstart - containing parser and writers. As a result of this change, validation and extension of kickstart is now much easier.

Serial mice are no long formally supported in the installer nor in Fedora Core.

Certain hardware configurations (particularly those with LCD displays) may experience problems while starting the Fedora Core installation program. In these instances, restart the installation, and add the nofb option to the boot command line.

	Note
	Chinese, Japanese, and Korean graphical installations started using the nofb option will start in English, and then switch to the appropriate language once the graphical phase of the installation process begins.

Some Sony VAIO notebook systems may experience problems installing Fedora Core from CD-ROM. If this happens, restart the installation process and add the following option to the boot command line:

pci=off ide1=0x180,0x386

This option allows the installation to proceed normally; any devices not detected due to the use of this option will be configured the first time Fedora Core is booted.

Serial mice are known to be inoperative during installation. However, there are indications that serial mice work properly in X after the installation has completed. Refer to bug 119474 for more information:

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119474

There have been issues observed when upgrading Red Hat Linux 7.<x>, 8.0, 9, and Fedora Core 1, 2, and 3 systems where third party packages are installed that conflict with packages provided by Fedora Project. One example is Ximian GNOME.

The issue with Ximian GNOME is caused by version overlap between the official Red Hat Linux RPMs (or the ones from the Fedora Project) and the Ximian RPMs. This configuration is not supported. You have several choices in resolving this particular issue:

You must resolve the version overlap using one of the above choices. Failure to do so will result in an unstable GNOME configuration.