The bug is that gnome-initial-setup can hang on the timezone setup screen. This seems to happen only on some NVIDIA hardware.
There have been multiple reports of this on F42 and F43, but we have not yet seen a report on F44. We’re not sure if it’s magically fixed in F44, or just nobody with an affected system has tried it yet.
None of us on the RH team seem to have affected hardware, unfortunately.
It would be great if more folks with NVIDIA hardware can test this. Unfortunately, you can’t test in a virtual machine, and you can’t really test on a live boot - I suppose you could hack things up to run g-i-s directly in the live environment, but we’re not absolutely sure that would reproduce the bug. You sort of have to do a real install to the hardware and boot to gnome-initial-setup to see the bug. So you have to be happy to reinstall your system now, or do a dual boot install, or have a test box with NVIDIA on it, or something. Please don’t do this testing on your production system if you’re not sure you’re OK to install an F44 pre-release on it!
It would be useful to hear from anyone with NVIDIA hardware who can just test an F44 RC1 Workstation install and see if they hit the bug, honestly. But the most useful thing would be if somebody can install F42 or F43 and confirm that they do see the bug, then try installing F44 and see whether they hit it or not on F44.
I’m wondering if the bug is in Nvidia firmware, in which case workarounds may be needed. It could be useful to know a) if the bug only occurs when timezone setup is invoked without changing to a different timezone, b) if only certain Nvidia cards are affected, and c) if systems with an iGPU can avoid the bug by disabling an Nvidia dGPU for the install.
Edit: I did a fresh, problem-free, install of the F44 Workstation Beta on an iMac 14,2 that only has Nvidia GK107M [GeForce GT 755M Mac Edition] graphics, and is connected to ethernet. The timezone setting defaults to the correct value for my location so does not need to changed.
Thanks for the info. It does seem like it’s affecting F44, on the whole. There’s no obvious reason it would be fixed in the nightly, and other testers have reported the same.
Good news is that airlied (graphics developer) is investigating it and looks like he’s getting quite far along, I’m hopeful we’ll get more good news from him tomorrow.
I’m more than happy to wipe my system and try F44. Which ISO do I use?
I confirmed it did happen while installing Fedora43-WORK-x86_64-LIVE-20260401.iso
Thank you all. The issue looks resolved. I could not replicate the issue on 44 (the freezing when setting time zone during install), even though I could consistently replicate it on 43.
For context, I tested this three times using the Fedora-Workstation-Live-44-1.2.x86_64.iso
The first two attempts involved installing over my existing Fedora 43 install using the “use entire disk” option, and then repeating the process again by installing 44 over Fedora 44 while still using that same option.
For third attempt, I booted into KillDisk, wiped the drive entirely, deleted all partitions, and performed a clean installation of Fedora 44.
In all my cases, the issue did not occur on Fedora 44.
