Fedora 11 Post Install Items

Original date: June 14, 2009 8:34 PM by sonnik

Fedora 11 (F11) was released recently. As Fedora prides itself on installing only truly open source software, there will always be a number of post installation tasks that you might want to take once installation is complete. Here's a quick guide of the tasks I performed. Hopefully they'll help you.

I read a few reviews of Fedora 11 prior to installing. One of them spoke highly of the version of KDE installed with Fedora 11 (version 4.2 of KDE is installed with Fedora 11). After working with Gnome for the past few years, I opted to give KDE a shot. I'll agree, KDE is quite impressive with the default install. So, in the examples below, I'm dealing with a KDE interface. In addition, the information for adding plug-ins may be specific to x86_64.

Getting Wireless to Work

This is a frequent conundrum. As Fedora ships with only binaries built off of open source items, this means they can't ship proprietary firmware binaries for many recent wireless drivers. The solution? You'll need to either plug in an Ethernet cable on a temporary basis, or figure out how to download the RPM for your hardware. For me, I simply plugged in the Ethernet cable to continue.

Again, due to Fedora's commitment to open source and open standards, you can't download the firmware directly from the Fedora standard yum repositories. You'll need to install a popular external repository, RPM Fusion. RPM Fusion is a popular collection of 3rd party applications that may not be able to be compiled in such a way to meet Fedora's standards. For example, some applications that are mp3 compatible may be hosted at RPM Fusion. (MP3 is actually covered in a patent held by Fraunhofer IIS, and thus not a truly open standard). To install the RPM Fusion repositories (as root):

[root@st3 /home/sonnik]# rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Once these repositories are installed I'm able to install the firmware for my Broadcom-based wireless device.

[root@st3 /home/sonnik]# yum install broadcom-wl

If I had an Intel-based wireless device, I might want to try

[root@st3 /home/sonnik]# yum install ipw2200-wl

or

[root@st3 /home/sonnik]# yum install broadcom-wl

Once I reboot, I'll be able to get on the network via wireless, provided I have the correct security credentials for my wireless network. (The process for connecting to a wireless network with a Linux desktop is pretty intuitive these days. You should have a network icon in the tray panel (notification area) in either Gnome or KDE.

Customizing the GUI

One thing I've noticed about both Fedora and Ubuntu... both Gnome and KDE tend to install with a default font size that's way too large. To fix this (along with a number of other GUI elements), simply navigate to:

Computer -> System Settings -> Appearance

As I mentioned, this is pretty much customization central in KDE. Whether you're adjusting power settings, screen savers, background, or just general window appearance, this is the place to set these configurations.

Making Firefox Media Friendly

To download the 64-bit Flash Player, I visited the Adobe Labs site. Once this was downloaded, I uncompressed it...

[sonnik@st3 Download]$ tar -xzvf libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

The resulting file, libflashplayer.so is then copied to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. (Root account permissions required). Once Firefox is installed, you should have flash player capability.

I also installed the gecko mediapalyer plugin, so various audio embedded players would work well also.

[root@st3 /home/sonnik]# yum install gecko-mediaplayer

Enabling Presto

Presto was originally scheduled to be part of the default installation of Fedora 11, but due to lack of testing - this was cancelled prior to general release. Presto is great, as it downloads only DeltaRPMs. These are smaller packages that can be merged with the installed packages rather than downloading full-size RPMs, thus saving on bandwidth for everyone involved. While it cuts down on download times, it adds time on compilation of the new RPMs. Overall, there is definitely a net time savings.

To enable presto

[root@st3 /home/sonnik]# yum install yum-presto

Leave a comment