earlier today, i tried to do an NFS-based install onto a laptop. everything went well, until the final (/var) filesystem was being formatted, then the install just hung with the formatting progress bar at about 90%. how odd, i thought. i checked one of the other VCs -- intermittent NFS errors -- so i started over, same kind of install. and a hang at *exactly* the same place, in the final part of formatting /var. ok, so that's not coincidence. give up on NFS install, go with the local CDROM and the CDs, partition everything the same way, and this time, i get *just* past the formatting, at which point i get the message that anaconda is transferring the install image to the hard disk. and then i get an "out of space" error, "disk full?" or something to that effect (this is from memory). now, first, i'll assume that the NFS install was actually getting to the same point, i just never saw it, and i never got that error. it only showed up when i did the CDROM-based install. does that make sense? it's sure annoying to now know why the NFS install was failing. but i'm curious -- why would i be running out of space? i partition my setup so that i need a fairly small root filesystem, and i picked 256M for mine. anaconda certainly didn't complain about this. but what i'm not sure about is this section in the release notes: ===== The disk space requirements listed below represent the disk space taken up by Fedora Core 3 after the installation is complete. However, additional disk space is required during the installation to support the installation environment. This additional disk space corresponds to the size of /Fedora/base/stage2.img (on CD-ROM 1) plus the size of the files in /var/lib/rpm on the installed system. In practical terms, this means that as little as an additional 90MB can be required for a minimal installation, while as much as an additional 175MB can be required for an "everything" installation. ===== "additional disk space is required"? where? in the root filesystem? i could have sworn that *somewhere* i remember reading that the install image is copied into ***RAM***, not onto the hard drive. so what does this have with needing extra space on the hard drive? for no good reason i can think of, i repartitioned and bumped the root filesystem up from 256M to 512M and it worked like a charm. so can someone clarify *exactly* what this required additional space is for? and if it's really necessary to allocate extra space in the root FS, shouldn't anaconda warn the user about insufficient space in the first place? that excerpt from the release notes is really not terribly informative. rday
