I am updating a laptop to Fedora Core 5, and I was tweaking the desktop for my needs and tastes but somethings just weren’t as intuitive for me using GNOME as they had been in KDE. Actually they may not even be a function of Gnome as a function of my other Linux installs. No matter what the cause here are some totally random tips and tricks that someone else might find useful when setting up a Fedora Core 5 desktop.
- Tweaking the Look and Feel – I am running GNOME right now since that was what Fedora defaulted to, but I am not a fan of the new anime-look of Fedora with the weird infinity F’s so I changed my desktop wallpaper with no problem and my login environment but wasn’t sure how to change the splash screen. The answer for me was to use gTweakUI, I just copied my splash screen to/usr/share/pixmaps/splash/ and then used gTweakUI to change how things look when they startup.
- Syncing a Treo 650 – I was having trouble syncing my I found this tip in a users group somewhere. When you want to sync your Treo 650 with Fedora the key is to add the Palm applet to your device tray, then using the drop down hit Pause Daemon, to pause the gpilot daemon. Then hit the sync button on your Treo. Then hit continue on the drop down from the pilot applet. I had to do this a couple of times until I got the timing right but at least now my evolution calendar has all my contacts.
- Wireless – The bane of the Linux desktop, wireless is still somewhat troublesome but at least my card is recognized and I have a nice simple GUI to look at available networks using Wireless Assistant. I am still having some problems entering WEP keys but more on that later
- Adding YUM repositories – In the olden days I used to just add YUM repositories to my yum.conf file but now it seems that you add them by going to /etc/yum.repos.d/ and creating repository files complete with GPG keys. Well I found the following RPMs to add the repositories, rather than creating them from scratch, using the syntax below will allow you to remotely install them:
- rpm -ihv http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/5/i386/RPMS.freshrpms/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
- rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/5/i386/livna-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
- Adding the tunes – My first thought when thinking about adding tunes was I need to download GTKPod which I had used in the past and Banshee that I have grown fond of as a music player. I was surprised to find that when I open Banshee that my iPod had already been mounted and that to import the music from my library I just chose to navigate to the mount point and import the music. When choosing the Synchronize iPod button I was greated with a warning that this might cause iTunes to not work on the Windows side so I skipped it and just did the manual import. Adding plug-ins for MP3s was the next step
yum -y install xmms-mp3 xmms-faad2 gstreamer-plugins-ugly libmad libid3tag
I am sure I will have many more tips as I continue to tweak but so far it’s amazing at how much better the Linux desktop is getting, though it’s still got a ways to go IMHO.
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