Fedora 15 post installation customization

The installation is pretty smooth as is always with Anaconda. You get to choose which packages to install. Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE, etc. are the desktop environment options available and I chose to install all. Installing more than 2000 packages from the DVD media didn’t take long!

After the one time post-installation configuration, I logged into Gnome 3. I was very much disappointed to loose those features of Gnome 2 I was used to. More about the Gnome 3 interface, tips, customizations and extensions here in this separate post :

https://motorscript.com/customizing-gnome-shell/

Firefox 4.0.1 comes with the distribution as the default web browser. Empathy is the default IM client, so Pidgin lovers like me have to go through one more yum install command. Also, banshee isn’t integrated, but Amarok and RhythmBox are available!

Dialogs in windows pop out of the title bar which isn’t a bad effect.

The system is very much stable, haven’t experience a single crash or bug problem yet. The system boots up pretty fast and resuming from hibernation is very very fast. The only disaapointment may be the change of UI in gnome 3, Fedora 15 is perfect otherwise.

Installing the essentials:

The commands listed in this thread are supposed to be run by a privileged user like the ‘root’ user. Switch to root user or run the following shell commands with sudo prefix. On special occassions, I login as root ;) - https://motorscript.com/enable-root-login-for-linux-systems/

Since Fedora is free, non-free packages like mp3 codecs and flash-player plugins are not be shipped with the distribution, which have to installed manually.

“RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; you can use the RPM Fusion repositories with tools like yum and PackageKit.”

Install free and non-free repository from with:

yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Install fastestmirror plugin for yum. Makes yum install packages from the fastest mirror.

yum install yum-fastestmirror

Install mp3 and other codecs: Multimedia:

yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree gstreamer-ffmpeg xmms xmms-mp3 xine xine-lib libdvdcss

Install VLC:

yum -y install vlc

If you want VLC to run as root (not recommended), see this post: https://motorscript.com/compiling-vlc-for-root-users/

Install flash player and plugin for browsers:

yum -y install gnash gnash-plugin

OR if the non-free/properietary Adobe Flash player is to be installed:

          yum localinstall --nogpgcheckhttp://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum -y install flash-plugin

Install 7zip and RAR plugins and executables

yum -y install p7zip p7zip-plugins unrar

Most probably your wireless device is supported out of the box. If it isn’t and if yours is a Broadcom WLAN device, follow this:

yum install kmod-wl
service NetworkManager restart
service networkrestart

MySQL and phpmyadmin:

yum install -y mysql phpmyadmin
chkconfig mysqld on
mysql_secure_installation
service mysqld restart