Fedora 10 x86-64 on a Laptop

I recently bought a Compaq Presario V3000 laptop after my IBM Thinkpad gave up on me. Since this is a 64-bit laptop I thought it will be a nice opportunity to jump into the 64-bit desktop experience.

A help request posted to Linux India Help mailing list produced a gloomy picture of the 64-bit desktop experience, while my search on google listed some great experiences. So I finally gave it a shot and after spending sometime with this set-up I can say that I am perfectly happy with it.

Here is what I did with the help of other netizens.

Installing Adobe Flash

Go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and select “Yum for Linux” from the drop down. Click on “Agree and Install now” button. Install the RPM file and accept to do a force install. You might need to enter root password twice.

Next install flash as follows:

$ sudo yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.x86_64 nspluginwrapper.i386 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i386 libcurl.i386

A whole lot of i386 compatibility packages will be installed (for me it was around 30MB of download).

Skype

Similarly for skype I just downloaded Skype for Fedora 7 and force installed it without GPG verification, again a lot of i386 compatibility libraries will need to be installed, but skype will work. I had to change the audio devices after trial and error, but at the end everything worked including the integrated web-cam. Following are the 32-bit libraries needed for skype to work.

yum -y install pulseaudio-libs.i586 pulseaudio-libs-devel.i586 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i586 libv4l.i586 libXv.i586 libXv-devel.i586 libXScrnSaver.i586 libXScrnSaver.x86_64 libXScrnSaver-devel.i586 libXScrnSaver-devel.x86_64 dbus-qt.i586 dbus-qt-devel.i586 qt.i586 qt-devel.i586

Multimedia

For most of the multimedia codecs we would need to activate the RPM Fusion repository. This can be done as follows:

sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
sudo yum update
sudo yum install mencoder lame gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-ffmpeg

DVD Playback

In order to play unencrypted DVDs the following should be enough

sudo yum install libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd

But in case you need to play encrypted DVDs we need to install libdvdcss which may have some legal issues in some countries. So if you install it, you are on your own. I have not needed to install this as I am planning to buy a DVD player anyway.

Livna repository has the libdvdcss available.

sudo rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm
sudo yum install libdvdcss

Google Linux Software

For now the google repositories only have Picasa and Google Earth for linux users. The detailed instructions from google on how to use their repositories are specified as http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/. The testing repositories from google are at http://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/testrepo.html.

I used the testing repository and hence did the following:

sudo rpm --import https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo
[google64]
name=Google - x86_64
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1  

sudo yum update
sudo yum install picasa

Java

For Java I installed OpenJDK with plugins

sudo yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel.x86_64 java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin.x86_64

To install Sun Java I downloaded jdk-6u12-linux-x64.bin and installed as follows:

chmod +x jdk-6u12-linux-x64.bin
./jdk-6u12-linux-x64.bin

Accept the license agrement, this will install JDK in the current directory. Next I will move it to /opt and create some symlinks to manage the JDK I use.

sudo mv jdk-6u12-linux-x64.bin /opt/
sudo chown -R root:root /opt/jdk1.6.0_12
sudo ln -s /opt/jdk1.6.0_12/ /opt/jdk
sudo vi /etc/profile.d/java.sh
source /etc/profile.d/java.sh

Fedora uses alternatives system to manage more than one versions of an installed program. I already have two versions of java installed, one is gcj and the other is the OpenJDK. So I have to add a third version of java to my alternatives system as below:

sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk/jre/bin/java 3

Next activate the Sun Java as follows:

sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --config java

select the option no 3 (which we just created).

Realplayer

For Realplayer11 setup, download the binary file from Realplayer homepage (somehow the RPM did not work for me). For getting realplayer to work in firefox nspluginwrapper is required

yum install compat-libstdc++-33
chmod +x RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
sudo ./RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
/usr/bin/mozilla-plugin-config -i /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so

Testing your Setup

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