e-ignite: Tech

Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

There have been many times I’ve sat at my computer wondering how to do such-and-such on Fedora Linux and haven’t been able to find a straight answer through all of my efforts on Google. I recently came across the Fedora Guide which has an excellent page of “how to” questions and answers. The Fedora Guide keeps it simple – for example, “How To Install Google Desktop” simply shows you the command you need to enter in Terminal (for Google Desktop, all you need to do is enter su -c ‘yum –enablerepo=google install google-desktop-linux’)

I found a number of entries I found useful, and even managed to enable several things I didn’t realise I missed from Windows, such as backspace to go “back” in Firefox. A few of my favourite tweaks are listed below:

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I’m not sure if it was just me that had this problem with Fedora 11, but after I upgraded from Fedora 10 the first thing I thought about the desktop experience was that the screen resolution looked quite low. On checking the settings via SYSTEM > PREFERENCES > DISPLAY, the resolution was up at maximum. It took me a while to see the problem, but it was the text size in the menus and on the icons that seemed huge.

Fortunately, this is an easy fix, and it makes Fedora look much better than the default setting:

"Low Resolution" default

"High Resolution" look with smaller font size

Simply go to SYSTEM > PREFERENCES > APPEARANCE and select the FONTS tab. From here you can choose the font face and, critically, the font size. I’d recommend that you drop this from the default 10pt to something nearer 7pt or 8pt. I use a Dell XPS M1210 laptop with Fedora 11 and it has a 12.1″ screen and a maximum display resolution of 1280 x 800.I think that 7pt looks pretty good.

A question that’s asked very often – “How do you enable mp3 playback on Fedora 11?”

Easy.  Just open a terminal window and enter the following:

su -c ‘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’

Next, simply enter the following into the Terminal window:

yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Once you’ve done this, Fedora will download and install all the necessary software to allow you to listen to mp3s. You may need to enter the root password to perform this installation.

If you’re not running the latest version of Fedora (for example, you’re running and Alpha or Beta version of a not-yet-released distribution), you’ll need to enter a different string.  Check out http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration/ to find the correct code to install repositories for your particular build.