Friday, January 20, 2012

Things to do after installing Fedora

Fedora is a great OS. Its Linux as it should be free and usable, at the cutting edge but completely stable. But it still lets a lot to be wanted such as the non free software, libraries which are essential in day to day life. Few nitty gritties installed and the make a wonderful environment to work and play.

1) Installing RPM Fusion, Livna Repos

Though most of the free softwares and codecs are quite capable of running the show, few restrictive and non free blobs such as mp3 support, VLC media player are the need of life. Most of these are not found on the official repos. These can be installed through the RPM Fusion repo. Livna repo is only needed for libdvdcss. Livna exist only for that package.

Adding or removing packages in Fedora is done through graphical frontend to yum, PackageKit. It is not possible to install yum repo through PackageKit. In order to install the RPM Fusion and Livna repo run in terminal;


2) MP3 support

Rhythmbox is the standard music player included in Fedora. Other players include Amarok, Audacious, etc.. The list goes on and on. In case of standard gnome install the default player is rhythmbox. For it to play mp3 gstreamer-plugin-ugly is needed.To install that,
yum install gstreamer-plugin-ugly

As pointed out by Kevin Kofler same command is also to be used in case of KDE and Amarok.

You can also install these plugins from the GUI by searching for them in the Add & Remove Software or PackageKit.

3) Install VLC

Totem is good but VLC is the best. Its open-source, light weight and so full of nifty features that you dont need anything else for all your media needs. It also supports many video codecs of the block.
yum install vlc

There are many features that can be done with VLC. You can read about it here.

 4) Install Flash player

Flash player was supposed to be dead but it isn't. It still drags on and you have to install it to use your favourite video site or online gaming site. Open source gnash is just not upto the mark to be used on an daily basis.


To install Adobe repo


In order to install Flash plugin
yum install flash-plugin

Thanks mr.Edrk for this heads up. 

You can also download Flash plugin RPM from its website here.


5) Configure backup


Fedora comes pre-installed with a great backup software Deja-Dup. Its easy to use and easier to configure. Configure a twice weekly backup to maintain sanity and do a regular backup in background and secure your files.


That rounds off the 5 things to do after installing Fedora. I enjoy using Fedora and these tips make my life easier. There are many tips and tricks and this unofficial faq is a great place to know about it. Please add your tips and tricks in the comments and I will be grateful and will add them here.

Updates:

I always wanted GUI for installation of softwares and codecs for Fedora. I didn't know they existed before seeing the comments. Thank you all for the update. All the codec installation can be done using GUI scripts such as autoplus, Fedora utils. Other great way to manage your GNOME desktop is by using gnome-tweak-tool. Great thing about File Roller the default archive manager is that it is extendable. Rar file support can be installed just by installing unrar 


yum install unrar

Posted by at 2:40 PM
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11 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 20, 2012 at 2:54 PM

    Wrong!

    Don't recommend on installing nspluginwarpper.
    for 64bit users, it is recommended to install the 64bit flash player from adobe

    ReplyDelete
  2. wannabegeekJanuary 20, 2012 at 3:08 PM

    @Anon
    nsplugginwrapper gets installed even if you download the 64bit flash player form adobe. I have it installed on my computer and it doesn't give me any trouble.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ErdkJanuary 20, 2012 at 4:28 PM

    Hmm, instead installing gstreamer-* stuff in KDE im using phonon-backend-vlc and vlc-npapi (for embed on web), and normal Flash x86_64 - no problems with in and don't require *i686 stuff, only native libs.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kevin KoflerJanuary 20, 2012 at 9:01 PM

    > If you like amarok or are using KDE spin of Fedora you have to install the phonon-backend-gstreamer in addition to the gstreamer-plugin-ugly.

    phonon-backend-gstreamer is already installed and enabled by default on the KDE spin of all currently supported versions of Fedora. (It has been the default Phonon backend since Fedora 15. And Fedora 14 and older are no longer supported.)

    > Flash player was supposed to be dead but it isn't. It still drags on and you have to install it to use your favourite video site or online gaming site.

    I don't have Flash installed. For YouTube, try their HTML5 beta, Minitube or one of the many downloaders out there (e.g. cclive). For other video sites, try cclive. As for games, there are plenty of games in the Fedora repository which are actually Free Software. (Neither the Flash games nor Flash are Free Software.)

    PS: You really need to move your blog off Blogspot/Blogger if you want people to be able to comment. It took me half an hour to get this comment through (it wouldn't work in Konqueror, neither with KHTML nor with the KWebKitPart, I managed to post with Arora now), the JavaScript on this site is completely broken, and there's no non-JS comment form.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. wannabegeekJanuary 22, 2012 at 10:01 PM

      @Kevin
      >phonon-backend-gstreamer is already installed and enabled by default on the KDE spin of all currently supported versions of Fedora. (It has been the default Phonon backend since Fedora 15. And Fedora 14 and older are no longer supported.)

      Thanks for the update, I didnt know that and will make the necessary changes.

      >I don't have Flash installed. For YouTube, try their HTML5 beta, Minitube or one of the many downloaders out there (e.g. cclive). For other video sites, try cclive.

      In youtube not all videos are HTML5 and not all video sites are HTML5 based e.g.Vimeo. It will be great if all turn into HTML5 but they are not. So for the near future lets have what works for us lesser folks. Minitube and cclive support only youtube.

      >Neither the Flash games nor Flash are Free Software.

      Even MP3 is not free, but it works. Same with Flash. Its there to be used so we do, until something better comes up.

      Delete
  5. YN1VJanuary 20, 2012 at 11:01 PM

    I install a lot of stuff that I know are very specific to me, but...

    For having power off option on the menu
    yum install gnome-shell-extension-alternative-status-menu gnome-tweak-tool

    I usually need to decompress file with other format:
    yum install unrar

    Be aware that for current installs of fedora livna only provide 2 packages: libdvdcss and libdvdcss-devel ... So if you don't need those, probably you can skip livna repo.

    ReplyDelete
  6. wannabegeekJanuary 20, 2012 at 11:53 PM

    @YN1V
    I agree this list is not for every one. I had missed gnome-tweak-tool and unrar which is a must for the fedora os. As for the extension I didnt purposefully add any extensions as I wanted to include in my next blog post. Along with alternative status menu there are many essential extensions which should be a part of the gnome shell as default.
    @mr. Erdk
    I have no experience with vlc-npapi plugin so cant comment.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousJanuary 21, 2012 at 8:13 AM

    Just do this:

    sudo yum --nogpgcheck install http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://dnmouse.org/autoplus-1.3-9.noarch.rpm

    Then:

    Menu >> System >> autoplus or Alt+F2 type autoplus then hit Enter

    Then:

    Tick "Install Most Codecs" and click OK
    When finished Tick on any thing else you may want IE. GoogleEarth, Lightscribe, VirtualBox, flash-plugin, Sun Java, ect... and click OK

    Note: autoplus works best when each item is installed separately instead of all at once.

    Your done.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2012 at 12:43 PM

    Fedora Utils? http://fedorautils.sf.net

    ReplyDelete
  9. youtube html5 playerFebruary 28, 2012 at 4:53 PM

    Thanks for sharing your info. I really appreciate your efforts and I will be waiting for your further write ups thanks once again.
    html5 converter

    ReplyDelete
  10. kriznaSeptember 19, 2013 at 5:25 AM

    Thanks ...
    install adobe flash player on fedora 19

    ReplyDelete

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