[To do] Top thing to do after installing Fedora 19

Top things to do after installing Fedora 19

¿De qué está hablando? Versión en español

Ok, I installed Fedora. What do I do now?

In this post I will show what I recommend you to do/install to make your computer run smoothly with Fedora.

I strongly recommend the use of a Terminal, except when I tell you to open "Software Update"  for example.

Updating and installing the packages

Definitely the first thing you need to do after installing Fedora is updating your packages and upgrading your software. Open "Software Software" and introduce your password.

The updates will load and you will be able to install them afterwards.

Or you could launch a Terminal and run the following command (as root):

sudo yum -y update

The first time you do this could take some time.

Usefull tools for this tutorial

You will need some tools for this tutorial and they will be very usefull afterwards.

Install wget and curl:

sudo yum install wget curl

Installing proprietary drivers

Graphic drivers : If your computer has a nVidia chipset you will need the proprietary drivers that correspond to your case. First check your hardware:

lspci | grep -i VGA

Or if you have a chipset with Optimus Technology use:

lspci | grep -i 3D

If you have that kind of chipset you must install Bumblee, please check this page.

Add the RPMFusion repositories. Install the free and non-free packages:

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-19.noarch.rpm

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-19.noarch.rpm

Then install the drivers:

sudo yum install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs

Multimedia Codecs

You need to add the RPMFusion repositories to do this.

Install the codecs that you need. Go to a Terminal and use the following command (adapt it to your needs):

sudo yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-extras gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg

If you want to play DVDs

sudo yum -y install libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd libdvdcss

If you want Flash support add the repositories that concern you.

For 32bit:

sudo yum -y localinstall http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

For 64bit

sudo yum -y localinstall http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

And then install Flash:

sudo yum -y install flash-plugin

I don't like Gnome, I want something else

If you don't like Gnome you can try different desktops. Fedora has support for Gnome, XMonad, Enlightenment, among others..

KDE: if you want to install KDE 4.10 just follow these steps:

sudo yum groupinstall @kde-desktop

Log out and then you will be able to use KDE.

If you want to install Gnome Classic Mode:

sudo yum -y install gnome-classic-session

Cinnamon

A great alternative for Gnome and Gnome Classic is Cinnamon.

sudo yum groupinstall "Cinnamon Desktop"

There are some others desktops that you may want to try, but I haven't. Here is a quick list of what you may want to install: XFCE, LXDE, Awesome, Xmonad, MATE... among others.

I like Gnome but I will like to tweak it

If you like Gnome, you can modify it so it will adjust to your needs.

You can install extensions by going to this site: https://extensions.gnome.org/

You can add widgets, workspaces and new tasks.

You may want to try Gnome Tweak Tools
 
sudo yum -y install gnome-tweak-tool

Internet

Google Chrome or Chromium: if you don't like Firefox you can install Google Chrome.
You can install Chrome using yum and localinstall with the following commands:

For 32Bit:

sudo yum -y localinstall https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.rpm

For 64Bit:

sudo yum -y localinstall https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

If you want to install Chromium. Add the following file in your /etc/yum.repos.d folder

http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium-stable/fedora-chromium-stable.repo

Update your packages

sudo yum update

And finally install Chromium

sudo yum install chromium

Transmission

If you want to download files using Bit Torrent, there is a client included with Fedora. Transmission is light and will do just enough: downloading torrents. You can change some of its configuration.

There are other options in Linux, like KTorrent, Deluge...

Thunderbird

If you want to install Thunderbird the only thing you need to do is:

sudo yum -y install thunderbird

Multimedia

A very frequent question that you find in some pages, is how to enable DVD playback. All DVDs uses an encryption algorithm, you will need to install a package that will decrypt the data.

You can find how to do that in the "Codec" section of this post.

VLC

A really great media player is VLC, basically it plays everything that you may want.

sudo yum -y install vlc

Clementine

Install Clementine a great media player, if you don't like Rythmbox

sudo yum -y install qtwebkit clementine

GIMP

If you do some photography and you don't want to invest a lot of money in Photoshop, you can try installing GIMP. I use it everyday and it has a lot of functionalities.

Just use the following command:

sudo yum -y install gimp

You will need this extra package to edit RAW files:

sudo yum -y install gimp-ufraw

This will allow GIMP to edit the imported file.


Inkscape

If you like to design sometimes a really great program to use is Inkscape. Here is an example I made on a rainy sunday.

sudo yum install inkscape

OpenShot

If you want to do some video editing in Linux, I think the best option is OpenShot. After adding the RPMFusion repositories use 

sudo yum -y install openshot

Did you just find out that Steam is on Linux?

That's right, Steam released its client for Linux a few months ago and it looks very good.

If you want to test it follow this intructions:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

sudo wget http://spot.fedorapeople.org/steam/steam.repo

sudo yum install steam

Here is how it looks in Fedora:

Messenger

Pidgin

If you have had some problems with Empathy another alternative is Pidgin, it supports many protocols like MSN, Facebook, IRC, Google Talk...

sudo yum -y install pidgin

Skype

If you want to install Skype in Fedora install by following this great tutorial.

Cloud y backup

Dropbox

A lot of people uses the cloud to make backups or to have many files accessibles from any computer. Go to the download page of Dropbox and use the RPM package.

You can do it with the command line too:

32-bit:

cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86" | tar xzf -

64-bit:

cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -

Next, run the Dropbox daemon from the newly created .dropbox-dist folder.

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

Deja-Dup

Something that I love about Linux is that there are many good programs to do backups. You can sync your files with a FTP, with Ubuntu One or with a hard drive.

Some tools for your system

LibreOffice

In Fedora you will need to install the LibreOffice suite.
Use this command:

sudo yum -y install libreoffice-writer libreoffice-calc libreoffice-impress libreoffice-draw

File managing

If you want to read PDF files you need something like Evince:

sudo yum -y install evince

If you download or share many files in the Internet maybe you need some tools for compressing. Here is a list of packages that you may need.

sudo yum -y install unace unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils rar
 

Note: If you intall the rar, unrar packages you will be able to read comics in .cbr format with Evince or oKular.

I need some Windows programs

Wine

If you need to install some Windows programs because you can't find a solution in the opensource world you can install the Wine emulator. You won't be able to run everything but I know that you can install a lot of useful things like Microsoft Office.

sudo yum install wine



Virtual Box

If Wine doesn't do the trick you can create a virtual machine and install the program that you want in it. The problem es that you need an ISO image of Windows. You will need to prepare the packages to install VirtualBox:

su

yum -y install kernel-headers dkms gcc

wget -c -P/etc/yum.repos.d/ http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo

echo 'skip_if_unavailable=1' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/virtualbox.repo
 
yum -y install --enablerepo=virtualbox VirtualBox-4.2-?.?.*

/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Programming (a.k.a "Why don't you compile?")

For people who use their machine for writing code, here is a list that you use for installing some basic packages for programming:

Essentials

First of all you want to install some basic packages that allows you to compile, this packages include gcc for example

sudo yum install gcc make bison

¿gcc is too old school?

Clang is a great compiler for C and C++, it has the same syntax that gcc but it has a nice output:

sudo yum install clang

Geany

A great text editor that can recognize various languages.

sudo yum install geany

Eclipse

If you want to do some programming in Java use the command:

sudo yum -y install eclipse


And you're good to go. Enjoy your new install!


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