I chose to download the full Fedora 9 DVD but there are some LiveCD versions which will be a familiar format to Ubuntu fans. After firing up the Fedora 9 DVD I was greeted by a pretty standard looking menu where I chose to install the OS and waited to see what would happen (see Figure 1). I was prompted to check the install media and make sure there were no errors. I could have skipped this step but I thought it couldn't hurt to be sure the disc was OK. This test took 9min 36sec to complete. Yes, I timed it.

Fedora uses the Anaconda installer (see Figure 2), which is a long-standing Red Hat development and a standard across their all systems. I've heard all kinds of horror stories about Anaconda and I know a few people who really dislike it, for me though it's always worked well and I have no real issues with it. My only gripe would be that it's sometimes a little slow. I proceeded through the normal settings screens choosing time zone, language and so on, then it was onto partitioning.

I have my system set-up with a 12-Gb root partition and a large partition for my home folder. I decided that in order to give me a quick route back to Ubuntu and preserve my settings I would just install the whole system onto the 12-Gb partition and not mount the other one. The partitioner is reasonably easy to use but in my eyes it's not very intuitive. Perhaps because I've become used to other distros. The whole installer seems aimed at administrative users who know what they're doing. This fits with the kind of users I suspect deploy Fedora and Red Hat systems, administrators and developers mainly. It's not aimed at the newbie, not the faint-hearted ones, anyway.

I let the installer do its thing and it formatted the 12-Gb drive, then began copying and installing packages. It took a whopping 35min 54sec before it was finally ready to eject the disk and reboot. This seems monumentally slow to me; I've been spoiled by the 10-min installs so many distros perform these days.

Upon first booting the new system I was greeted by a prompt to accept the GPL license agreement and then more dialogues asking for user name details and other things. This didn't take long to complete, but it would seem more logical to me to ask you all of these questions in one go during the install. Nevertheless, after about an hour the system was ready and I was looking at my new desktop. It's not a difficult install really but I felt it was very time consuming.

Next: Configuring The System »