It turns out that doing a net install worked fine. This confirms that somehow, the "Retry" button on the Fedora installer is badly broken and can easily lead to an inconsistent system with the packages either not installed, or installed without necessarily being read correctly. The system works now, although I noticed one other gotcha just now. Recent versions of yum apparently have each repository learn where the repository can be downloaded from by contacting Redhat's website. All good, but the fedora section of their website is undergoing maintenance, which I only learned after prodding at how yum works for awhile. I bet this is going to confuse a lot of people while the maintenance lasts.

Listening more to the Anastacia soundtrack, I am impressed at how badly it mangles Russian history. It's one thing to make Rasputin into some kind of powerful undead sorceror, it's another thing to have him actually be hunting down Anastacia Romanov. It'd be like the ghost of Paul Revere going after the zombie of George Washington -- regardless of artistic licence, the two were on the SAME SIDE. Rasputin was a friend of the Russian royal family, and would not have supported the Bolshevik/Menschevik cause.

While doing some spot research on the background of this now, I came across two interesting quotes that Lenin assembled together for commentary (which I will omit) on the Trudoviks (The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907).

Nechitailo: These lands that belong to the peoplewe are told: buy them. Are we foreigners, who have arrived from England, France, and so forth? This is our country, why should we have to buy our own land? We have already paid for it ten times over with blood, sweat, and money

Saratov Gubernia: Gentlemen of the nobility, do you think we do not know when you used us as stakes in your card games, when you bartered us for dogs? We do. It was all your sacred, inviolable property.... You stole the land from us.... The peasants who sent me here said this: The land is ours. We have come here not to buy it, but to take it