1) The installer told me that I didn't have enough space for /usr and that I needed to free up ~38Mb. I freed up about 50Mb, and after booting: Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda6 1018392 885428 80348 92% /usr It seems that the installer isn't quite there on its free space calculations. 2) After deselcting some packages, to free up space, I chose OK, and the installer then tried to mount the target filesystems again, with resulting errors. It coped, though, and installed fine, and overall the installer seems much more robust than previous releases. 3) I don't know what it's when looking for "overlapping files". At a guess, it's seeing if there are files already on the partitions which would get replaced. If so, it could save some time by remembering which filesystems were mkfs'ed (or by searching the filesystem first and the rpm file list second). 4) Feature request: "expert" mode should permit manual tweaking of mse2fs parameters. Also, by default, I suggest bigger blocks for larger filesystems (2k for >200Mb, 4k for >500Mb) and fewer inodes. (Actually, Ted T'so is threatening to change the defaults on future versions, but it would be nice to be able to do it manually.) Also, hacking mke2fs to give a status indication on stderr, rather like rpm's -h option would allow adding a progress bar to the mkfs stage.
We are working to get the space estimations a little closer to "real world" and things should be lots better in the next installer. If the user knows he/she has enough space, then he/she should choose to continue with the installation and ignore the warning.
Feature requests noted for later versions.