I’ve been using Fedora on my workstation at the office for quite a while and was pretty happy with it but when it came to install on home machine I was never able to complete setup for one reason or another.

What really surprised me is how flaky LiveCD’s were when it comes to my system and setup. I had installer crash on me in random places and overall quality of installed system being below what I have on my workstation at the office. After multiple failed attempts and aggravation caused by Fedora’s inistance on renumbering of my MD devices which causes annoying inconvenience booting Gentoo back, I have arrived at a setup option that looks workable: Install from DVD. Not liveCD! Fedora didn’t make it an apparent choice – it’s burried in their download screens under “alternative media”. Installing F14 I used that option which explains why I never had problems with that install. Now after using F15 Installer DVD I think it should’ve been the default option and liveCD should be a fall-back.

Here’s the difference – liveCD already has a pre-installed version of the OS that you may or may not agree with and apparently some settings there didn’t quite agree with my system design. Now that I went through full install and was able to customize system at install time (not to mention net install option where you install up-to-date system) things look much brighter.