The Fedora Live CD promised a small download (smaller than three CDs anyway) with the option to install over the net. It booted up fine, but meagre system resources rendered it unusably slow. I double-clicked the "Install to hard disk" icon and the CD started merrily spinning, and went on spinning all night. Come morning I had to do a hard reset and was relieved to see the old Mandrake system come online.

Plan B is now in the works. I grabbed the "alternate" CD, which permits a barebones install that needs only 128 MB of RAM. We shall see if one can really turn on a LAMP in around 15 minutes.