Fedora 20 works pretty well out of the box but you have to remember that Fedora keeps their distro pure so nothing proprietary can be packaged with the mainline release. That's where the rpmfusion repos come into play. More on that below. The very first thing I do after booting into my desktop (Gnome 3.10) for the first time is to rearrange my dual monitors - they are backwards no matter how I route the VGA and DVI cables that run them... My system is a dell e6520 laptop with a quad core i7 CPU, nVidia GPU (Need to disable dell Optimus graphics in bios) and 16GB of 1800mhz RAM. Secondly, I need to add the desktop shortcut for gnome-terminal so I can start tweaking without having to go find and launch the terminal each time. I have been used to using ctrl+alt+t so that's what I'll set gnome for. Find the Gnome settings drop down n the upper right hand corner: Find keyboard: Select the shortcut tab and create a new shortcut. I call mine Terminal and then enter gnome-terminal as the command. Hit apply and then click on the text that says 'disabled' and then hit your key sequence. Now anytime I hit ctrl+alt+t my terminal window springs up. Now we'll need to update the system with Code: sudo yum update Type your user password (it won't display) and hit enter, answer the questions y/n, etc and then accept any pgp keys that fedora packages are signed with. When this is complete I always reboot since there is a 99% chance that you now have a new kernel. Prior to reboot, I change my mount options in fstab to add the special mount options for my SSDs Code: sudo gedit /etc/fstab Boot into your updated system. Now let's add the RPM Fusion repos so we can install extra and non-free packages. Follow the instructions to enable RPM Fusion free for Fedora 20 and secondly RPM Fusion nonfree for Fedora 20 through this link (and then come right back ) Configuration - RPM Fusion Once this completes, let's grab gnome-tweak-tool from RPMfusion so we can customize the DE a bit (necessary to fix fonts). Code: sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool Now run tweak tool and make any changes you'd like. I turn on desktop icons and configure fonts along with a few other small tweaks (date and seconds in top bar, etc.) #### sidenote, yum allows you to search all the installed repos for packages even if you don't know what they are called. I recently installed the yubikey gui by searching with Code: sudo yum search yubikey I was able to easily see that the package was actually called yubikey-personalization-gui #### Make your font choices look like the below picture including the hinting and antialiasing settings. This will make your f20 install more enjoyable although still not as clean as Ubuntu or Mint - it can be done but the liberation sans fonts are good enough for me. Install Adobe Flash 64-bit Code: sudo yum -y install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm 32-bit Code: sudo yum -y install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm Install (for either 32 or 64 bit) Code: sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux sudo yum -y install flash-plugin I install Google Chrome as I like the way it renders better than FF - it's also less memory leaky in my experience First we need to add the Chrome repository: Code: sudo gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo This creates and opens the new file in a text editor. Add the below depending on your arch and save: 32-bit Code: [google-chrome] name=google-chrome - 32-bit baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/i386 enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub 64bit Code: [google-chrome] name=google-chrome - 64-bit baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64 enabled=1 gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub Now install Chrome with one of the following commands (I use beta) Code: yum install google-chrome-stable Code: yum install google-chrome-beta Code: yum install google-chrome-unstable One thing to note about Fedora is that it's the bleeding edge test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux so it updates rapidly. I run a Code: sudo yum update daily and almost always have updates. They really listen to those bug reports and make upstream corrections rapidly. Another thing that's up to date is the fedora kernels. They are frequent and current with the mainline kernels that Linus pushes out with just a short delay by Fedora for tweaking. Here's my system running smoothly via top: and in system monitor:
Almost forgot - multimedia codecs to get proprietary formats to play: mp3, mp4, etc. Code: sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly
Thanks Melbo!! I needed this last week when I was having problems with quicktime playing. I guess i installed too many plugins for FF and they didn't like each other. i uninstalled one of them and quick time started working.
@kckndrgn I've had the above mentioned Chrome-beta running for days at a time with no issue. More plugins = more headaches which is why I don't get too much into themes and other desktop plugins that are outside of the fedora branch. too many headaches. My system (as is this server) is rock solid, secure and a joy to use.
@melbo, you ever have any problems with FF displaying a page correctly? I use Chrome mainly at work cause FF decided to change the way it handled PDF's, and I've had intermittent issues with some sites using FF. Here is an example. When I go to sportsmansguide.com the detail for a product I'm looking at will not show, but it does in Chrome ( and IE if I'm on a winblows box). not sure if it's a plug in that's messing things up, or just something with sportsmans guide site.
Melbo, I did check out Fedora 20. Looks pretty good, but the download I got was really bare bones. I didn't install it to anything, yet, may or may not. I lean more toward Mint as you may remember. The one thing I liked more than anything, was the fact I could connect direct to the net without the hassle of having to tell Fedora how, (wired connection, but with dns ip code). The same thing is true with Mint 17, I do not have to type in the dns ip code, just works right out of box or disc, if you will. I will probably stick with Mint, as it's what I've become accustom to. However, thanks for all the help over the years - yes it has been that now. PS. I'm not posted over on the gim site for a while now, due to all the trolls etc., thanks too, for keeping them out.