Fresh Install From Nightly Compose desktop-x86_64-20091002.15.iso

[Robert L Cochran]

I did a fresh install from the desktop-x86_64-20091002.15.iso nightly 
compose. The installer needs quite a lot more work. I couldn't get this 
to work from a USB script, because I got a Grub error 17. I think there 
is some special trick to get around this, but I shouldn't need to know 
it. I decided to burn the iso to a CD, boot to the CD, and then click 
the "Install to Hard Drive" icon on the resulting desktop.

I was installing this to replace an earlier and encrypted Fedora 12 
Alpha system. I checked the boxes to "replace existing Linux system" and 
"Review and Modify partitioning". The hard drive partitioning screens 
didn't show LVM Volume Groups as I expected. Instead it just showed 
/dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 with no swap partition. sda1 wasn't listed as 
/boot for the mount point and the filesystem type was grayed out to "Not 
applicable". I modified this to show the mount point and an ext4 
filesystem. I deleted and recreated sda2 manually, as '/', and added a 
swap partition manually.

I specified encryption for the system and even though I was prompted for 
an encryption passphrase, I was never prompted for it after booting the 
system. Does anyone know how I can encrypt my hard drive after 
installing a system?

When the installation procedure finished, I discovered that firstboot 
starts, but it does not show the "Next" button if your system is a 
laptop and you have an external monitor connected to the laptop's vga 
connector. That is really annoying. The navigation bar on the left side 
of the firstboot screen ought to have clickable links.

After some stumbling around, I discovered that I could boot to runlevel 
3 and do the "authentication setup" in text mode, then add a user, then 
change the password for that user. Then reboot and be able to log in 
graphically as the user.

Bob