Description of problem: When installing F17 the user added during install does not appear in /etc/sudoers or the wheel group. As a result, the user cannot use sudo. In fips mode, su and direct login as root are rejected, so the result is that one needs to boot into non-fips mode just to be able to login as root to edit the groups or sudoers file
Was this kickstart or interactive install? An interactive install doesn't do user creation in the installer, that's handled post-install by firstboot. If it's kickstart, then anaconda does create the user. A workaround for when you're in kickstart is using %post to modify sudoers. The user kickstart directive has a --group option that lets you specify additional groups, such as wheel. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#user
interactive install, so re-assigned to firstboot
If you check the "add to administrators group" when creating the user, it will add the user to the wheel group.