Fedora 11 Hiccups

So, here are the all the issues I ran into when installing Fedora 11 on a new-ish computer.

Computer: Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2, with SATA hard-drive, and IDE CD/DVD drive, and 4G of RAM.

2009-06-20:
Given that the i386 Fedora cannot see all of 4G, I first tried the x86_64 install. The Fedora install notes also say that for Core 2 Duo processors, the 64-bit install is recommended.
Right at the outset, it failed. Booted off a DVD install kit, and got stuck where the install said "install media driver not found", and asked me to select a driver, I selected pata_amd (for IDE CD/DVD), and forcedeth (for ethernet), but no luck, it kept repeating - no driver, then select driver, with no way to break the loop. It also failed to recognize the VGA card, and performed the install in text mode.

Retried the install over the network. Now the install proceeded to completion, but when the system started, there was no X driver for the video card. Having spent 2+ hours on this, decided to shelve this approach.

2009-06-21:
Using the i386 DVD install, everything went smoothly. It had no trouble finding all drivers, did the install, and Fedora was up. It even selected the PAE kernel, so can see all 4G of RAM (most of it anyway).
This probably indicates that there is some packaging problem with the x86_64 version?

Current problem:
Cannot play DVDs, even locally created, no encryption DVDs. Have installed libdvdcss and other modules mentioned at the unofficial fedora faq. Xine reports no mpeg codec, and keeps popping up the error window, ad nauseum.

2009-06-23:
Gave up on Fedora, was taking too long to get basic stuff running, and 64-bit not working was a big problem, and discovered that it was not Linux, or the Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2 motherboard issues - Kubuntu installed with incredible ease.

So, no more Fedora, at least for now. The install process for Fedora was nice, looked good, when it works. Kubuntu was a bit less polished on install, but given that the install is a once-only task, not a big deal.