Install Fedora 45 Server and Workstation Step by Step

The Fedora 45 ISOs are under dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/45/, in each edition’s x86_64/iso/ folder. The Server DVD is Fedora-Server-dvd-x86_64-45-1.4.iso (about 4.1 GB) and the Workstation Live image is Fedora-Workstation-Live-45-1.4.x86_64.iso (about 2.9 GB). The one you pick decides your installer. Server boots the classic Anaconda hub, while Workstation runs the Anaconda Web UI inside a live desktop and leaves account creation to GNOME Initial Setup.

Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 171902

You’ll download the ISO, check its signed CHECKSUM file, write a USB stick, click through every installer screen, and finish with either edition installed and reachable over SSH. I went through every step again in November 2026 with the Fedora 45 ISOs (build 1.4) on KVM guests with Secure Boot on, and they still hold.

Fedora 45 Server vs Workstation: pick the right ISO

The two editions share the same packages underneath, but the installer, the storage defaults and what’s running after first boot are different. This table comes from our two test installs, so you can decide before you download 3 to 4 GB of ISO:

Item	Fedora 45 Server	Fedora 45 Workstation
ISO type	Offline DVD (about 4.1 GB) or netinstall	Live image (about 2.9 GB)
Installer	Anaconda GTK hub and spokes	Anaconda Web UI, 4-step wizard
Default storage	XFS on LVM, root capped at 15 GiB	Btrfs with / and /home subvolumes, zstd compression
/boot filesystem	XFS	ext4
User account created in	The installer (User Creation spoke)	GNOME Initial Setup after reboot
Network and hostname	Full static IP editor in the installer	Hostname only; network comes from the live session
Remote management	Cockpit on port 9090, enabled	None by default
SSH server	Enabled, port 22 open in firewalld	Installed but disabled
Packages after install	748	1974
Desktop	None (text console)	GNOME on Wayland

Pick Server for anything headless: a VM that runs containers, a database box, a home lab node, or a bare-metal host you manage through Cockpit or SSH. Pick Workstation for a laptop or desktop you sit in front of. If you’d rather have KDE Plasma than GNOME, grab the KDE Plasma Desktop edition, which uses the same Web UI installer covered in the Workstation half of this guide. Curious what changed in this release before you commit? Our rundown of what’s new in Fedora 45 covers the desktop, kernel and packaging changes.

Hardware requirements

Fedora publishes a low floor and a more realistic recommendation. The table puts the official guidance next to what our lab VMs used:

Resource	Technical minimum	Fedora’s recommendation	Our lab VM
CPU	2 GHz dual core, x86_64 or aarch64	2 GHz quad core for Workstation	2 vCPU (Server), 4 vCPU (Workstation), host CPU type
RAM	About 1 GiB for Server, 2 GB for Workstation	4 GB	4 GB (Server), 8 GB (Workstation)
Disk	About 5 GiB for Server, 15 GB for Workstation	40 GB	40 GB
Firmware	UEFI or legacy BIOS	UEFI	OVMF UEFI, Secure Boot keys enrolled
Display (graphical install)	1024×768	Higher is more comfortable	1280×800
USB stick	4 GB for Workstation, 8 GB for the Server DVD	8 GB	n/a (ISO attached to the VM)

The Server install used 2.2 GB of the root filesystem right after installation, and the Workstation install used 4.6 GB. For a Server that runs containers or databases, size the disk for the data, not the OS, because the OS footprint barely grows while /var/lib/containers and database directories do.

Download the Fedora 45 ISO

The final Fedora 45 ISOs live under releases/45 on Fedora’s mirror network. The Server download page and the Workstation download page still offered the Fedora 44 images when we checked on release day, so confirm the file name ends in 45-1.4 before you click, or pull the ISO from any Linux box with curl as shown below. These are the two images we downloaded and verified, with the SHA256 values from Fedora’s signed CHECKSUM files:

Edition	ISO file	Size	SHA256
Server (offline DVD)	Fedora-Server-dvd-x86_64-45-1.4.iso	4,100,390,912 bytes (about 4.1 GB)	fcc0f623708ddbd7656df152510ba018bad618bfc99879e73809255fb11a48ff
Workstation (Live)	Fedora-Workstation-Live-45-1.4.x86_64.iso	2,925,092,864 bytes (about 2.9 GB)	68338c6bfe4f0d64151f2e47efe9f44a8855ad05b460e56b844fb3fa2c9a3beb

The Server directory also carries a smaller netinstall image that pulls packages from the mirrors during setup. Whichever route you take, make sure the file names end in 45-1.4 and come from releases/45, because those are the images the hashes below belong to.

The command route is handy when you’re staging the ISO on a hypervisor like Proxmox, because it fetches the signed checksum file you need in the next step too. Set the edition you want (Server or Workstation) and the release path:

export EDITION=Server
export FEDORA_PATH=pub/fedora/linux/releases/45

Rather than typing the file names, read them from the directory listing, so the same commands keep working if Fedora respins the images. The last line warns you when nothing matched:

LIST=https://dl.fedoraproject.org/${FEDORA_PATH}/${EDITION}/x86_64/iso/
ISO=$(curl -sL ${LIST} | grep -oE "Fedora-${EDITION}-(dvd|Live)[^\"]+\.iso" | head -1)
SUM=$(curl -sL ${LIST} | grep -oE "Fedora-${EDITION}-[^\"]*CHECKSUM" | head -1)
echo "ISO=${ISO} SUM=${SUM}"
[ -n "${ISO}" ] || echo "No ISO found under ${FEDORA_PATH}"

For the Server edition the detection printed the DVD image and its checksum file:

ISO=Fedora-Server-dvd-x86_64-45-1.4.iso SUM=Fedora-Server-45-1.4-x86_64-CHECKSUM

With EDITION=Workstation the same commands return Fedora-Workstation-Live-45-1.4.x86_64.iso and Fedora-Workstation-45-1.4-x86_64-CHECKSUM. Now download both files through download.fedoraproject.org, which redirects you to a nearby mirror:

curl -LO https://download.fedoraproject.org/${FEDORA_PATH}/${EDITION}/x86_64/iso/${ISO}
curl -LO https://download.fedoraproject.org/${FEDORA_PATH}/${EDITION}/x86_64/iso/${SUM}

The Workstation ISO took about five minutes with plain curl on our link. If the redirect lands you on a slow mirror, aria2c -x8 -s8 with the same URL splits the download across several connections, and that’s how we pulled the 4.1 GB Server DVD in under five minutes.

Verify the ISO signature and checksum

Skipping this step is how people end up debugging a “broken installer” that’s really a truncated download. The CHECKSUM file is signed with the Fedora 45 key, so you check two things: that the checksum file is genuine, and that your ISO matches it. Fetch Fedora’s public keyring first:

curl -O https://fedoraproject.org/fedora.gpg

Check the signature on the checksum file with gpgv:

gpgv --keyring ./fedora.gpg ${SUM}

A good file reports a valid signature from the Fedora 45 primary key. The final Server CHECKSUM file was signed on 31 October:

gpgv: Signature made Sat 31 Oct 2026 07:09:58 AM UTC
gpgv:                using RSA key 4F50A6114CD5C6976A7F1179655A4B02F577861E
gpgv: Good signature from "Fedora (45) <[email protected]>"

The fingerprint to compare against is 4F50 A611 4CD5 C697 6A7F 1179 655A 4B02 F577 861E. Then confirm the ISO itself matches the signed checksum:

sha256sum --ignore-missing -c ${SUM}

You want to see OK next to the ISO name:

Fedora-Server-dvd-x86_64-45-1.4.iso: OK
sha256sum: WARNING: 17 lines are improperly formatted

We ran the same pair of checks for both editions, one after the other in the same directory. Both CHECKSUM files carry a good signature from the same key, and both ISOs report OK:

Before you move on, tick these off:

• You can see “Good signature” from [email protected] in the gpgv output.
• You can see the same fingerprint as the one printed above, character for character.
• You can see OK after your ISO name in the sha256sum output.

If you see that “improperly formatted” warning, that’s normal. It refers to the PGP signature lines wrapped around the hashes in the CHECKSUM file, not to your ISO. A real mismatch prints FAILED instead of OK, and in that case download the ISO again before going any further.

Create a bootable USB for a physical install

You can skip this section if you’re installing into a VM; just attach the ISO as a virtual CD/DVD drive. For bare metal you need a USB stick of at least 8 GB for the Server DVD (the image is 4.1 GB, more than a stick sold as 4 GB holds) or 4 GB for Workstation, and everything on it will be erased. On Windows or macOS, Fedora Media Writer is the tool Fedora itself recommends. On Linux, dd does the job. Plug in the stick and identify it first, because the part that trips people up is writing to the wrong disk:

lsblk -d -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TRAN

Look for the device whose size and usb transport match your stick. In this example it’s /dev/sdb; replace that with your own device name before running the write. The command reuses ${ISO} from the download step, so run it in the same shell and directory, or swap in the full path to the ISO:

sudo dd if=${ISO} of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress oflag=direct conv=fsync

Write to the whole device (/dev/sdb), never to a partition like /dev/sdb1. Wait for dd to return before you unplug the stick, since conv=fsync makes it flush everything to the device first.

Physical server vs virtual machine: what changes

The installer screens are identical on bare metal and in a VM. What differs is the firmware, how disks and NICs are named, and which helper packages you want afterwards. These are the things worth checking before you boot the installer:

Area	Physical server or PC	Virtual machine (KVM, Proxmox, VMware)
Firmware	Use UEFI mode. Secure Boot can stay on, Fedora’s signed shim and GRUB boot with Microsoft’s keys. Some Secured-core laptops ship with the Microsoft third-party UEFI CA disabled, so enable that option in firmware if the USB refuses to boot. Legacy BIOS still works.	Use OVMF/UEFI (Proxmox: BIOS set to OVMF, machine q35). Secure Boot with pre-enrolled keys booted both editions in our lab.
Disk names	nvme0n1 for NVMe, sda for SATA/SAS	sda on VirtIO SCSI, vda on VirtIO Block
NIC names	eno1, enp3s0 and similar, based on the firmware index or PCI location	ens18 on Proxmox VirtIO NICs, enp0s3 on a plain QEMU guest like ours
RAID	Prefer Linux software RAID or plain disks. Firmware (fake) RAID is supported by the GTK installer; the one GRUB error to know about is covered at the end of this guide.	Not relevant; redundancy lives on the host storage
Graphics	Older NVIDIA cards need the legacy RPM Fusion driver on Workstation	Server: any display. Workstation: QXL or VirtIO GPU, 1280×800 or larger.
Guest tools	Not needed	Server installs qemu-guest-agent and open-vm-tools by default. Hyper-V guests need hyperv-daemons added.
Faster alternative	n/a	Fedora also ships a ready-made Server KVM qcow2 and Cloud Base images, so you can skip the installer entirely for throwaway VMs

For reference, both lab installs ran as KVM guests with machine type q35, OVMF firmware with the Secure Boot keys enrolled, a VirtIO SCSI controller, a VirtIO NIC and the host CPU type. The Server VM used the standard VGA adapter, and the Workstation VM used QXL set to 1280×800 so GNOME would start a graphical session at a readable size. If you run KVM on a Fedora host yourself, the same choices apply in virt-manager, which is covered in our guide to installing KVM on Fedora.

On a physical box, open the firmware setup (usually F2, F10, F12 or Del at power-on), make sure the SATA mode is AHCI rather than RAID unless you really use firmware RAID, and pick the USB stick from the one-time boot menu. On a VM, attach the ISO and put the CD/DVD drive first in the boot order.

Install Fedora 45 Server

Boot the Server DVD and GRUB shows three entries. The highlighted default is “Test this media & install Fedora 45”, which reads the whole ISO before starting. Since you’ve already verified the checksum, press the up arrow and choose Install Fedora 45 to save a few minutes:

The installer then loads and opens on its language screen. On our VM that took a little over a minute.

Choose the installation language

Anaconda guesses your language from your IP address. On our Kenyan lab network it guessed Oromoo (Keeniyaa), not English, and the Workstation installer made the same guess. If your screen opens on a language you didn’t expect, that’s normal GeoIP behaviour, not a broken ISO:

Select English in the left column and English (United States), or your own regional variant, on the right, then click Continue. You can also type the language into the search box under the list:

Continue takes you to the Installation Summary. The header should read FEDORA 45 INSTALLATION with no red warning banner beneath it; if you see one, go back to the checksum step before you install anything you plan to keep, because the checksum is the real proof you have the 45-1.4 DVD. The check costs nothing, because that title sits in the top right corner of every Anaconda screen.

Use the Installation Summary hub

The Server installer is a hub. Every item is a spoke you open, change, and leave with the Done button in the top left. Items with an orange warning icon must be completed before the Begin Installation button unlocks. On a fresh disk that meant Installation Destination, Root Account and User Creation. Creating an admin user clears both user warnings, even with root left disabled:

Keyboard, Language Support and Time & Date follow the language you chose. The time zone was set to Africa/Nairobi automatically, again from GeoIP, so you only need to open Time & Date if that guess is wrong. Installation Source stays on the auto-detected DVD, and the network was already connected through DHCP.

Review the software selection

The Fedora Server Edition base environment comes with four add-on groups ticked: Container Management, Domain Membership, Guest Agents, and Hardware Support for Server Systems. Headless Management is unticked here, but Cockpit still gets installed and enabled because it’s part of the Server edition itself. Leave the defaults unless you know you want a smaller system, in which case “Fedora Custom Operating System” gives you a bare base to build on:

Click Done to return to the summary, then open Installation Destination.

Set the installation destination and the 15 GiB root

Pick the Target disk. On this VM it shows up as a 40 GiB QEMU disk named sda, and it’s already ticked because it’s the only one. Automatic partitioning works, but choose Custom once so you can see exactly what Fedora is about to create, then click Done:

The Manual Partitioning screen opens empty, with LVM preselected as the scheme. Click “Click here to create them automatically.” to let Fedora propose its default layout:

Fedora 45 Server proposes a 600 MiB EFI partition, a 2 GiB /boot, and an LVM volume group called fedora holding a 15 GiB XFS root. The rest of the disk stays unallocated inside the volume group, which is why Available Space reads 1.97 MiB even though the root is small:

That 15 GiB cap is deliberate. Server keeps free space in the volume group so you can add logical volumes for /var/lib/containers, a database, or backups later, or grow root when you need to. If you’d rather have one big root from day one, change Desired Capacity here and click Update Settings. Otherwise keep the default and grow it after install, as shown further down. Click Done and review the list of changes:

Click Accept Changes. The installer writes nothing to disk until you press Begin Installation, so you can still back out. If a line in that list surprises you, Cancel & Return to Custom Partitioning puts you back on the layout screen with nothing lost.

Configure the network and host name

The network was already up through DHCP. For a server you almost always want a fixed address, and it’s far easier to set it here than to fix it over a console later. Click Configure, open the IPv4 Settings tab, switch Method: Manual, click Add and type the address, netmask and gateway, then fill in the DNS servers field and click Save. Our lab used 10.0.1.50/24 with 10.0.1.1 as the gateway and 10.0.1.3 for DNS:

Back on the network screen, type a fully qualified name into Host Name and click Apply. Then flip the Ethernet switch off, wait a few seconds, and switch it back on so the connection picks up the new settings:

Don’t worry if the IP Address row stays blank after the toggle. On the final build our panel showed the static gateway and DNS server but left the address empty, even after waiting, and the installed system still came up on 10.0.1.50, as the first-boot console shows below. Click Done once the gateway, DNS and host name look right.

Leave root disabled and create an admin user

Fedora disables the root account by default, and that is the right choice for most servers. Keep Disable root account selected and you’ll do admin work through sudo instead:

Open User Creation, type your full name, and check the User name it fills in. “Add administrative privileges to this user account (wheel group membership)” is ticked already, which is what gives the account sudo rights, so leave that wheel group membership box alone. Use a strong password, because SSH password logins are allowed by default and this account is reachable over the network as soon as the machine boots:

Click Done to save the account and return to the summary. Set a password even if you plan to log in with SSH keys only, because sudo still asks for it every time you run an admin command.

Begin the installation

Back on the hub, every warning icon is gone and Begin Installation is active:

Click it. The DVD install copies and installs 748 packages, then configures the system, generates the initramfs and writes the bootloader:

On our VM with 2 vCPUs and SSD-backed ZFS storage it finished in about 11 minutes. When you see Complete!, remove the USB stick (or detach the ISO from the VM) and click Reboot System:

The server then reboots into the installed system. On a VM, detach the ISO before it comes back up, because with the CD/DVD drive still first in the boot order you’ll land in the installer’s GRUB menu again.

Log in after the first boot

After GRUB you land on a text login. Fedora 45 moved the console to kmscon, which is why the banner reports pts/0 rather than tty1. The banner also prints the Cockpit address, and here it showed the static 10.0.1.50 we set in the installer:

Log in with the user you created, or better, SSH in from your workstation. A key login saves you typing the password on every connection, and it lets you switch password logins off later without locking yourself out. SSH is enabled and allowed through the firewall, so copying your key over works straight away:

ssh-copy-id [email protected]

Check which services the default firewalld zone allows. Server uses its own FedoraServer zone:

sudo firewall-cmd --list-all

Only Cockpit, SSH and the DHCPv6 client are open on a fresh install:

FedoraServer (default, active)
  target: default
  ingress-priority: 0
  egress-priority: 0
  icmp-block-inversion: no
  interfaces: enp0s3
  sources:
  services: cockpit dhcpv6-client ssh
  ports:
  protocols:
  forward: yes
  masquerade: no
  forward-ports:
  source-ports:
  icmp-blocks:
  rich rules: 

When you add services later, open their ports the same way. Our firewalld guide for Fedora covers zones, services and rich rules in detail.

Log in to the Cockpit web console

Cockpit listens on TCP port 9090. Browse to https://10.0.1.50:9090 (your server’s address), accept the self-signed certificate warning, and fill in User name and Password with the same account before you click Log in:

The Overview page shows health, usage and system details, and it already reports “running Fedora Linux 45 (Server Edition)”. It opens in Limited access mode, so click Turn on administrative access and enter your password whenever you need to change settings, install updates or manage storage from the browser:

One storage default is worth revisiting now: the 15 GiB root volume. Cockpit’s Storage page can grow it too, but the command line shows exactly what changes, so the next step uses LVM directly.

Grow the root volume into the free space

Remember the 15 GiB root? Check how much space is still waiting in the volume group:

sudo vgs

On the 40 GiB disk, 22.41 GiB was sitting unused:

  VG     #PV #LV #SN Attr    VSize  VFree
  fedora   1   1   0 wz--n-- 37.41g 22.41g

If this box only runs one workload, give all of it to root. The -r flag grows the XFS filesystem in the same step, online, with no reboot:

sudo lvextend -r -l +100%FREE fedora/root

LVM resizes the volume and then calls xfs_growfs for you (the long XFS geometry dump is trimmed here):

  File system xfs found on fedora/root mounted at /.
  Size of logical volume fedora/root changed from 15.00 GiB (3840 extents) to 37.41 GiB (9577 extents).
  Extending file system xfs to 37.41 GiB (40168849408 bytes) on fedora/root...
xfs_growfs /dev/fedora/root
data blocks changed from 3932160 to 9806848
xfs_growfs done
  Extended file system xfs on fedora/root.
  Logical volume fedora/root successfully resized.

XFS can grow but it cannot shrink, so if you plan to carve out separate volumes for containers or databases, use +10G style sizes instead of +100%FREE and leave the rest in the pool.

Update and verify the Server install

The ISO is a snapshot from release day, so pull the latest updates before you put anything on the box:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y

Three days after the CHECKSUM files were signed, the first run already installed 13 new packages and upgraded 141, including a newer kernel, for a 647 MiB download:

Transaction Summary:
 Installing:        13 packages
 Upgrading:        141 packages
 Replacing:        142 packages

Total size of inbound packages is 647 MiB. Need to download 647 MiB.

Reboot into the new kernel:

sudo systemctl reboot

Once it’s back, a quick round of checks confirms the install is healthy. Run them and tick each one off:

• You can see “Fedora release 45 (Forty Five)” in /etc/fedora-release.
• You can see the updated kernel from the upgrade in uname -r.
• You can see the grown root volume in df -h /.
• You can see sshd, cockpit.socket and firewalld all report active.
• You can see SELinux in Enforcing mode and Secure Boot enabled.

On our Server, every check came back clean after the update and reboot:

DNF on Fedora 45 is DNF5, so if older dnf habits misbehave, our DNF5 cheat sheet maps the old commands to the new ones.

Install Fedora 45 Workstation

The Workstation ISO boots into a live GNOME session first. Its GRUB menu has the same “Test this media” default as Server, but it only waits a few seconds, so press the up arrow quickly and choose “Start Fedora-Workstation-Live”. If the countdown beats you in a VM, nothing breaks: in ours the media check just added a couple of minutes before the live session started. A welcome dialog then offers to install Fedora or let you try the live system, so click Install Fedora Linux…:

If you close that dialog by accident, search for “Install to Hard Drive” in the Activities overview to reopen the installer. Installing a machine you can’t sit in front of? The same Web UI can be driven from a browser on another computer, as our guide to the Fedora remote install Web UI shows.

Set the language and keyboard

The Web UI installer is a four-step wizard: Welcome, Installation method, Storage configuration, and Review and install. It made the same Oromoo guess from GeoIP as the Server installer. Click the Language search field, type your language, pick English (United States) or your own variant from the suggestions, and click Next:

The header reads “Fedora Linux 45 (Workstation Edition) installation”, which confirms you booted the right image. The keyboard layout sits under the language, and you should change it here if you type on anything other than a US layout, because the same layout is used to unlock an encrypted disk at boot.

Choose the installation method

Choose the destination disk and how to use it. On a blank disk the only choice is Use entire disk. When the installer finds free space or an existing operating system, it also offers options to share the disk. Keeping Windows 11 on the same drive? Back up the BitLocker recovery key and shrink C: first, as the Fedora and Windows 11 dual boot guide explains. For a manual layout, the storage editor link under the options opens a Cockpit-based partition editor:

Notice the disk size here reads 42.9 GB while the Server installer called the same size disk 40 GiB. The Web UI counts in decimal gigabytes and the GTK installer in binary gibibytes, so it’s the same disk in different units.

Decide on disk encryption

The only storage choice on this step is encryption. For a laptop, tick Encrypt my data and set a Passphrase. You’ll type it at every boot, using the Keyboard layout during boot shown above the passphrase fields:

We left encryption off on this VM because a passphrase prompt on every boot gets in the way of automated lab work. On a real laptop that leaves the building, turn it on, because it’s the difference between losing hardware and losing data.

Review and install

The review page shows the full plan. Fedora 45 Workstation lays the disk out as a 629 MB EFI partition, a 2.15 GB ext4 /boot, and one Btrfs partition holding separate / and /home subvolumes that share all the remaining space. There’s no 15 GiB cap like on Server, because both subvolumes draw from the same pool:

The host name defaults to a transient one from DHCP. Click edit next to Hostname to set a permanent name; the dialog says it may contain letters, numbers and dashes, so something like fedora-desktop is the safe pattern. Then click Erase data and install.

The install runs through storage configuration, software installation, system configuration and finalization. On our VM with 4 vCPUs it finished in about five minutes:

Click Reboot and remove the USB stick or ISO when the machine restarts, so the firmware boots the new install instead of the live image again.

Finish GNOME Initial Setup

Workstation creates your user account on first boot, not in the installer. GNOME Initial Setup starts automatically, so click Start Setup:

Step through Privacy (the Location Services toggle) and Time Zone. The Time Zone map first asked us to search for a nearby city, then filled in Nairobi from GeoIP a few seconds later, so give it a moment before you type. Next comes the Third-Party Repositories page. Click Enable Third-Party Repositories to add Google Chrome, the RPM Fusion NVIDIA driver repository and Steam to your software sources, which is what most desktop users want, then click Next:

On About You, enter your Full Name. The Username fills in automatically by joining your names in lowercase (ours came out as lornachepkoech), and you can shorten it with the pencil icon. It becomes your home folder name and can’t be changed later, so get it right before you click Next:

Set a password on the next page, then click Start Using Fedora Linux. You can take the short GNOME tour or skip it. This first account is an administrator automatically, so sudo works for it straight away.

Check the Workstation desktop

Fedora 45 Workstation lands on GNOME with the new release wallpaper and runs on Wayland only. There is no GNOME on Xorg session to pick at the login screen anymore:

Open Settings, then System, then About to confirm what you installed. Read the GNOME Shell Version and Kernel Version rows; on the final ISO they showed GNOME 51.0 and the kernel the image shipped with, before any updates:

Before anything else, pull the latest updates, either from the Software app’s Updates tab or from a terminal with sudo dnf upgrade --refresh, and reboot. From there, our things to do after installing Fedora 45 checklist covers codecs, Flatpak, GNOME extensions and drivers, and setting up Flathub opens up the rest of the desktop app catalog.

Enable SSH on Workstation

Unlike Server, Workstation ships the SSH server disabled. The quickest route is in the GUI: open Settings, then System, then Secure Shell, and flip the Secure Shell switch. GNOME asks for your password, and the SSH Login Command row shows what to type on the other machine:

If you’d rather use a terminal, check the service state first:

systemctl is-enabled sshd

A fresh install reports it as disabled:

disabled

Enable and start it in one go:

sudo systemctl enable --now sshd

This is what the whole sequence looked like in the Workstation terminal, ending with sshd enabled and active:

You don’t have to touch the firewall for this. The default FedoraWorkstation firewalld zone already allows the ssh service (plus TCP and UDP ports 1025 to 65535), so the machine is reachable as soon as sshd starts.

Check the storage layout after install

It’s worth confirming the layout each edition actually created, especially if you plan to add snapshots or extra volumes. On Server, lsblk shows the LVM stack under the XFS root (captured after growing root):

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINTS

The Server disk holds the EFI and /boot partitions plus one LVM physical volume:

NAME             SIZE FSTYPE      MOUNTPOINTS
sda               40G
├─sda1           600M vfat        /boot/efi
├─sda2             2G xfs         /boot
└─sda3          37.4G LVM2_member
  └─fedora-root 37.4G xfs         /
zram0            3.7G swap        [SWAP]

The same command on Workstation shows a single Btrfs partition mounted twice, once for each subvolume:

NAME    SIZE FSTYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      40G
├─sda1  600M vfat   /boot/efi
├─sda2    2G ext4   /boot
└─sda3 37.4G btrfs  /home
                    /
zram0   7.7G swap   [SWAP]

Neither edition creates a swap partition. Both use compressed swap in RAM through zram, sized to the installed memory. Btrfs on Workstation is mounted with compress=zstd:1, which you can confirm with findmnt -no OPTIONS /. That Btrfs layout is exactly what snapshot tools expect, and our guide to Btrfs snapshots with Snapper on Fedora builds on it.

Fixes for problems you may hit

These are the issues that came up in our installs, plus the known Fedora 45 issues that only show up on specific hardware.

The installer opens in the wrong language

Anaconda picks the default language from GeoIP. On a network that geolocates to Kenya, both installers preselected Oromoo (Keeniyaa) on the final ISOs too. Choose your language manually on the first screen, and the rest of the installer follows it.

“/etc/yum.repos.d is empty” after installing Fedora 45

This is a real change, not a broken install. Fedora 45 moved its own repository definitions out of /etc and into /usr:

ls /etc/yum.repos.d/ /usr/share/dnf5/repos.d/

On the Server install, the Fedora repos only exist under /usr/share/dnf5/repos.d/:

/etc/yum.repos.d/:

/usr/share/dnf5/repos.d/:
fedora-cisco-openh264.repo
fedora.repo
fedora-updates.repo
fedora-updates-testing.repo

Workstation goes one step further. After we enabled the third-party repositories in Initial Setup, /etc/yum.repos.d/ was still empty, because google-chrome.repo, rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.repo and rpmfusion-nonfree-steam.repo ship in the fedora-workstation-repositories package under /usr/share/dnf5/repos.d/ as well. All three loaded their Fedora 45 metadata without errors. The package signing keys moved the same way, to /usr/share/pki/rpm-gpg/. Repositories you add yourself still go into /etc/yum.repos.d/, and a file you put in /etc overrides the copy in /usr, so older guides that edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo or import keys from /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/ need those paths updated.

“invalid magic number” after reinstalling on firmware RAID

If GRUB prints invalid magic number and you need to load the kernel first after repeated reinstalls onto firmware (fake) RAID with the GTK installer from the Server or Everything image, the disk was written by an older installer image. The cause was a caching bug in blivet that corrupted the disk, and Fedora QA confirmed on 2 November that the 45-1.4 images carry the fix, so reinstall from that image.

Fedora’s common issues entry marks its workarounds as no longer necessary for that reason. Run the checksum step on your ISO first, because a mismatch there is the quickest way to tell you are not on a 45-1.4 image.

Older NVIDIA card falls back to nouveau

Maxwell and Pascal GeForce cards (roughly the GTX 745 through GTX 1080 Ti, plus GT 1010/1030 and the MX110 to MX350 laptop chips), along with Quadro and Tesla models from those generations and Volta cards such as the TITAN V, no longer work with the current RPM Fusion akmod-nvidia driver and fall back to nouveau. They need the legacy 580xx branch, as described in Fedora’s common issues entry for older NVIDIA GPUs. The legacy packages live in the full RPM Fusion nonfree repository, not in the NVIDIA-only repo that the Workstation third-party toggle enables, so add RPM Fusion first (our guide on enabling RPM Fusion on Fedora walks through it). On our Fedora 45 install the RPM Fusion release packages installed cleanly and all three 580xx packages resolved.

With Secure Boot on, a module that akmods builds is not signed by any key your firmware trusts, so it will not load and you stay on nouveau. Do the signing setup from RPM Fusion’s Secure Boot howto first: install the signing tools, generate a local key and queue it for enrolment. mokutil asks you for a one-time password; on the next boot pick Enroll MOK, then Continue and Yes, and type that password:

sudo dnf install kmodtool akmods mokutil openssl
sudo kmodgenca -a
sudo mokutil --import /etc/pki/akmods/certs/public_key.der

Once the key is enrolled, swap the driver and build the module, which akmods now signs with your key:

sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia akmod-nvidia
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-580xx akmod-nvidia-580xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-580xx-cuda
sudo akmods --force

Reboot to load the new driver. On a machine with Secure Boot off, you can skip the key steps and run only the second block.

setfont or loadkeys stopped working on the console

The Fedora 45 console runs on kmscon instead of the kernel framebuffer console, so setfont and loadkeys have no effect there. Set the keymap with localectl set-keymap and adjust console fonts and sizes in /etc/kmscon/kmscon.conf. SSH sessions and the GNOME terminal are not affected.

If you’re already running Fedora 44 rather than starting from a blank disk, you don’t need to reinstall at all. An in-place upgrade keeps your data and settings, and our guide to upgrading Fedora 44 to 45 walks through the GUI and dnf system-upgrade routes.