This page documents common bugs in Fedora 18 and, if available, fixes or workarounds for these problems. If you find your problem in this page, do not file a bug for it, unless otherwise instructed. Where appropriate, a reference to the current bug(s) in Bugzilla is included.
Fedora 18 has not yet been released. During this pre-release period, this page will cover known issues in the Fedora 18 pre-releases. Issues that are fixed will be removed from the page once a fix is available (for instance, an issue that affects the Beta but is fixed in the final release will be removed at the time of that release).
Release Notes
Read the F18 Alpha release announcement and the Fedora 18 Alpha Release Notes for specific information about changes in Fedora 18 and other general information.
My bug is not listed
Not every bug is listed in this page, but Bugzilla should be a comprehensive database of known bugs. This page is a sampling of the bugs most commonly discussed on our mailing lists and forums.
To see if your bug has already been reported, you can search Bugzilla. If it has not yet been reported, we encourage you to do so to help improve Fedora for yourself and others. A guide to Bugs and feature requests has been prepared to assist you.
If you believe an already-reported bug report should be added to this page because it is commonly encountered, you can:
- Add it yourself, if you have wiki access. Please follow the style and guidelines explained in the comments in the page source.
- Or, add the CommonBugs keyword to the bug report. Someone from the QA team will then inspect the issue to determine whether the bug should be listed as a common bug. To expedite your request, please add a comment to the bug that includes
- a summary of the problem
- any known workarounds
- an assessment on the impact to Fedora users
For reference, you can query Bugzilla for bugs tagged CommonBugs:
- CommonBugs? (bugs with CommonBugs keyword, but do not yet have a link to this page)
- CommonBugs+(bugs with CommonBugs keyword and contain a link to this page)
Installation issues
Installer boot options documentation is outdated
link to this item - Bugzilla: #864468
There are currently two pages documenting the boot options of the installer of Fedora 18 Beta: Anaconda Boot Options and http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/doc/boot-options.html. Both of them are at least partly outdated. Hopefully Anaconda team will update the documentation in a reasonably timeframe, in the meantime you need to have a look at both and take a guess which of the boot options are current and which are obsolete, provided that you need some of them.
Installer freezes briefly in remote repository setup
link to this item - Bugzilla: #874287
If you use a remote package repository for the installation (netinst image or inst.repo boot argument), you might experience a brief freezes in the installer interface, usually lasting several seconds. It is assumed this is related to setting up the repository source and downloading metadata in the background. There is no loss of functionality, just wait a short while if you see the interface not responding immediately.
MATE installation is broken from the DVD media
link to this item - Bugzilla: #878985
If you select to install the MATE desktop in Fedora 18 Beta from DVD installation media, you'll receive a very incomplete environment. The available workarounds are either to use the netinst image instead of DVD or to set the installation source to network repositories instead of the internal DVD package repository.
Invalid installation source breaks many configuration screens
link to this item - Bugzilla: #875003
If you happen to provide invalid installation source (in the Installation Source screen) in the Fedora 18 Beta installer, some installer screens might become corrupted even when you provide a correct installation repository (like Closest mirror) afterwards. Most often the package selection screen gets corrupted, but other screens like partitioning or keyboard selection screen might be affected too. The only safe workaround is to reboot and start the installer again.
UEFI boot doesn't work with liveusb-creator
link to this item - Bugzilla: #810112
liveusb-creator is one of the recommended tools for converting optical media ISO images into a bootable USB images. However, this tool still hasn't implemented the support for UEFI boot. If you want to install Fedora in the UEFI mode from a USB media, use either dd or livecd-iso-to-disk to create it. The full guide is described in How to create and use Live USB.
Installer crashes with degraded/incomplete RAID, LVM or Btrfs
link to this item - Bugzilla: #873224 Bugzilla: #876441
The installer in Fedora 18 Beta cannot successfully use degraded or incomplete RAID or LVM setups. The installer might crash in this case. This might affect also certain configurations or Btrfs.
This will be fixed for the Final release.
Fedora 16 can't be directly upgraded to Fedora 18
link to this item - Bugzilla: #873375
Beginning with Fedora 18 Beta, a new upgrade tool 
fedup
Installer crashes instead of presenting an error dialog when disk is too small (or other errors)
link to this item - Bugzilla: #854856
If you try to install Fedora 18 Alpha to a very small disk, the installer will likely crash with an error PartitioningError: not enough free space on disks. In general, there are several cases where there is code in the installer to catch errors, but no 'error handling' code to present a dialog to the user with appropriate options when one of these errors occurs.
There is no workaround for this kind of problem, but in any case where this happens, it indicates some kind of problem in your installation attempt. You may be able to tell from the error message and traceback what the error is, and correct it in another attempt to install. For this specific error, the problem is that the target disk is too small.
This has not been fixed in Fedora 18 Beta, although the symptoms might be a bit different now.
Hardware issues
Software issues
Various issues in desktop sessions started via startx
link to this item - Bugzilla: #806491
If you start a graphical session in Fedora 18 Alpha by logging into a virtual terminal and running the startx command, you may find that at first all appears to be fine, but various small issues appear. Some effects that have been noted are issues with the GNOME lock screen, issues running virtual machines, the Suspend option not appearing in the User menu when holding the alt key, and several other issues related to session handling.
The root issue here is that session handling is not done correctly for desktop sessions started via startx. Using the command startx -- vt01 instead of plain startx will resolve several of the issues, though possibly not all of them.
Possible data loss dual-booting with Windows 8
link to this item - Bugzilla: #859373
Using the "fast restart" feature of Windows 8 and rebooting into Fedora may lead to data loss. Files written to the Windows partition by Fedora may be deleted when rebooting into Windows 8. This may be avoided by disabling the "fast restart" feature in Windows 8.