On 2012-11-30 23:21 (GMT-0500) Felix Miata composed:
Getting to the initial GUI seemed to take forever.
I timed it, from pressing ENTER for the appropriate Grub menu entry to start HTTP installation, it took 5 minutes 10 seconds to reach the GUI. Most of the time spent with dracut-initqueue times/amounts filling the bottom of the screen.
/proc/cmdline contained: repo=http://mirrors.us.kernel.org/fedora/releases/test/18-Beta/Fedora/x86_64/os ip=192.168.1.20::192.168.1.1:255.255.255.0:myhost::none nameserver=192.168.1.1 rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 splash=verbose noipv6 selinux=0 resolution='1024x768' video=1024x768 vga=791 nofirewire
Doing the same thing with F17 kernel/initrd took about 4m 10s.
http://testmy.net/results reports download speed 7.9mbps
Doing the same thing with Mageia 2 took about 2m 10s.