The Problem

I downloaded the Fedora netinstaller because I wanted to try out some other window managers (GNOME was making my head hurt). However, for some strange reason the installer just wouldn’t go past the point where you have to configure your install destination.

Then, while checking journalctl logs, I stumbled upon a log message which indicated that something was wrong with my primary disk (The logs were from blivet, the module that Anaconda uses). That primary disk happened to have Fedora installed.

The first thing that I suspected was btrfs, especially something related to snapshots. The log message had something about not being able to mount subvolumes, and for some reason this just felt like a btrfs snapshots thing.

For those of you who don’t know, Fedora decided to use btrfs as their default filesystem about 2-3 releases ago.

After that, I put my super Googling skills to use.

The Solution

Ok, let me be honest here. I have absolutely no idea about how btrfs works. The only thing that I knew was that it creates snapshots… a lot of them if you like to run a lot of docker containers.

Github Issue Link

Warning: The below command will remove ALL your docker images that are not in use by a container!

TL;DR : docker system prune -a --volumes

After doing this on my main installation (the disk that the Fedora installer logs were complaining about), I booted into the netinstaller again and was able to get it working!

No more butter for now. I’m gonna go back to my good old friend, XFS. Once I get a proper understanding of btrfs, maybe then I’ll be able to find a better solution to this problem.