I'm putting this in rants since I gave up and used the DVD, so there's no question. I'm curious if anyone else had a similar experience though, as I've seen no mention of it.
I tried to install Fedora, a minimal install, from the netinstall.iso, burned to USB. The first time, I thought I'd just picked a bad time or bad mirror. Making several attempts it would always fail. Either it would fail to download, saying there was a metadata checksum mismatch, or, it would start, but fail to unpack any package, and fail. For example, it might have been something necessary like glibc or something that shouldn't break an install. like fedora-logos (although apparently grub2 depends upon them, but that's another rant.)
So, Ok, thought I had picked a bad day or had a bad connection, eventually used the install DVD. (Note to folks--at this time, and I don't know if it will be changed, if using a DVD on USB to avoid network issues, you have to either use dd to copy it, or if using livecd-tools, use the later F17 version. If you use an older version (in my case, the first time I used the CentOS version) even though it's the install DVD, something doesn't figure out that the USB is the source and goes looking on the Internet. Sorry, don't clearly remember the details, it was just another frustration that night, that, the next day, struck me as more funny than anything else.)
However, on two other occasions this last week, I again attempted netinstalls of the i686 version with similar results. In all cases, I fixed it by downloading the full install, but it was frustrating. I was doing minimal installs, but it would always, once it did get connected, die on some package or another.
In contrast, several x86_64 netinstalls were the usual troublefree ones, with no problems.
I would put it down to my network connection, but I had the same issue in two different locations with two different networks. Still, I haven't seen anyone else mention this as a problem. Has anyone run into something similar with i686? (Not x86_64--as mentioned, in two seperate locations on several machines, netinstall was completely troublefree.)