Fedora Core Getting Started

Now go to MPlayer's download site for Windows 32 bit Video Codecs and download the links Latest Win32 codecpack, QuickTime6 DLLs (should be faster), and RealPlayer9 codecs (including RV40). Create a directory called /usr/lib/win32 and put all of the contents of the ZIP files you just downloaded. Note: All of the files must go directly into the win32 directory. If you put them into subdirectories under win32 (which is how they come in the ZIP files) then Totem will not see the codecs and you will not be able to play all the different kinds of video.

A Word About Permissions

You aren't going to get far installing new software or making changes to a Linux system unless you have the right permissions. There are several ways to go about getting them:

1. Login as root and make the changes or use the su command to change to the root user to install Apt & Synaptic.
2. Give the user you normally run as permissions to change almost anything. This is a bad idea.
3. Edit your /etc/sudoers file to add yourself to the list of those with privileges to perform actions. Then you can prepend commands that require administrative privileges like rpm with the sudo command (i.e. sudo rpm -i apt-0.5.5cnc6-0.fdr.8.rh90.93.i386.rpm) to get the privileges you need to execute one and only one command. That provides more security in the system because it doesn't leave you logged in with permissions where you might do unintentional damage.
   

Software Installation Made Easy

Apt and Synaptic Are Your Friends

One of the best things about the partnership between the Fedora project and Red Hat to produce this new Linux distribution is that there is now a strong emphasis on making sure that there is lots of useful software readily available and easy to install. You've already seen some of the neat software you can install and I've made a point of telling you how easy it is to install with Synaptic.

What Synaptic does is give you a simple GUI where you can pick software to install and then install that software. Synaptic uses another piece of software called Apt behind the scenes to perform the actual installations but you won't see any of that. Your only exposure to Apt will be to make sure it gets installed before Synaptic when you are first installing the software. Once both are installed then you can install dozens and dozens of programs with point and click ease.


Installing: Go to the Fedora How-To to get the apt and synaptic programs. With the two files (both ending in .RPM) downloaded you can now install them quite easily.


To install the programs just double-click on the Apt file first. Fedora will ask you for the root password so it can install the new software. Once that has completed repeat the same process with the Synaptic file.

After you install Synaptic, run it for the first time using the instructions below and click the "Update List", "Upgrade All", and "Proceed" buttons. This will probably upgrade one or more programs on your system. Then you need to follow the instructions at Livna (in the Fedora section) to add another repository to the list of repositories which Apt and Synaptic know about. You must have the Livna repositories in your list or you won't be able to get multimedia programs like Totem or XMMS-MP3.

A repository is a place which stores a group of software programs for download and installation. Both Apt and Synaptic are capable of getting lists of programs from multiple repositories, presenting them, getting your selections and downloading programs from one or many locations for installation.

Running: Find Synaptic on the menu under System Settings/More System Settings/Synaptic. Unless you are currently logged in as root it will ask you for the root password so it can install new programs.

Almost all the installs above followed the same pattern under Synaptic. Just type a search into the "Find Package" (a package is Fedora lingo for a program or group of programs you can install) area on the Synaptic interface and hit enter. It will list a set of categories containing packages that matched your search. Pick individual ones from the list, hit the "Install" button, and then when you've selected all the packages you intend to install hit the "Proceed" button.

Common Requirements

Running Software On Startup

If you have certain programs you need to have run every time you login, there are two ways to get there. One way is when you log out, shut down, or restart your machine you are given a chance to "Save Your Setup" on the same dialog that asks if you are sure about exiting. Check the box and the next time you start up, the same programs you were running when you shut down will be started up again. It's not perfect but it works pretty well.

The other way is to explicitly list the programs you want to run. To do that run Preferences/More Preferences/Sessions and click on the Startup Programs tab. From here you can add/edit/delete programs which you want run when you login. It's a lot like the Windows startup folder except that you have more control over what gets run and exactly how it is run.

Connecting A USB Memory Key

In this case you can see it as /dev/sda1 in the list of hard drives. It shows up as a 62MB fat16 (aka vfat) drive on my machine. Equipped with that knowledge I can make this USB key available on my system.

The way I do that is actually fairly easy. First I have to create an empty directory somewhere on my hard drive. That empty directory will be the "mount point" for my drive and after I've mounted it I'll go to that directory and anything I do inside it will actually be interacting with the usbkey. I can copy files there, move them out, delete them, etc. and it will just appear to be a normal part of my file system. No Linux program will treat the key any differently than any other part of my file system.

The second step is to edit the /etc/fstab file (which requires root permissions). At the end of the file I put a line like this one:

/dev/sda1       /mnt/usbkey vfat defaults,noauto,user 0 0

I won't go into detail on this line because honestly I can't. I can tell you that it specifies the device to mount (what you found using the Hardware Browser), the directory where it will be mounted (/mnt/usbkey in this case but whatever you created in yours), and vfat specifies the file system type on the drive. Almost all keys you encounter are going to take vfat in that spot I've been told.

Once you've got the above line in the file and you've saved the file you can right click on the Fedora desktop and you will see a "Disks" item on the context menu that pops up. Underneath the menu you should see a usbkey entry. Select that entry and if you've done everything correctly a new drive icon will appear on your desktop and you can copy to/from it, etc. Before you remove the key you must unmount it so any data writing not yet done can be completed. Just right click on the drive icon and select the "Unmount Volume" entry. After the icon disappears and only after the icon disappears should you remove the key from the machine.

Assigning Functions To Extra Keys On Modern Keyboards

If you want to see me grouse at length on the topic of keyboard support you can read my article Why Johnny Can't Hit Volume Up. The short version of it is that keyboard support on Windows for anything beyond the basic 101 keys depends on having current drivers which are usually unique to a given keyboard. So if you end up with an unsupported albatross like the old Yahoo! keyboard you may find you can't use the extra keys on the keyboard with Windows some day down the road if a new version of Windows ships which cannot load the old driver which came with the keyboard. In this department Linux fares slightly better because you can get tools which will let you map any key to some function provided you can just identify the keycode the keyboard sends when one of the extra keys is pressed. So there can't ever be a period where a given keyboard ends up completely unsupported.

On the other hand, Linux has other problems because the best tool I've found to perform this key to function mapping is Hotkeys and it lacks any kind of graphical user interface. So you end up having to resort to editing a couple of text files to assign functions to your keyboard keys.

Installing A New Font