Fedora 11 Released

Spread the word: the release that dwarfs previous releases, Fedora 11, is here. Reviews have been flooding the internet and many have been talking about it in the open source world. But before you go ahead and install it make sure you read the release notes. Many a time we get stuck with installation or post installation and run around cursing the OS whilst the issue might have been a know bug with the solution in the release notes.  The Common Bugs is yet another link to read.

A few things you can do to make your Fedora experience better:

1. Install presto plugin.

Fedora 11 Review: What to expect from it

With about two weeks for the final release I hear many talking about Leonidas. I hear ext4, faster boot speed, new volume control and a lot of things  which I could not comprehend.  So I read the Feature List page in the Fedora project wiki and decided to come up with features that one might want to look up before installing 11 on to the system. As usual I’ve been using 11 from beta stage and have update it all this while. It is stable, in fact I have not experienced any bugs . Talking of bugs, I hear they even have a new bug reporting system for the non geeks which will send reports automatically. Lets have a look at the features most prominently advertised first and then go to the less popular ones.

Volume / Sound Problems in Fedora 11

If you seem to be having trouble using the new volume control in Fedora 11, as in you cannot hear anything. In my case with headphones plugged in sound was perfect but the speaker seemed to fail. Looking at the release notes I got the answer. Use this command to increase volume:

alsamixer -c0

This should give you a screen like the one below:

Now all i had to do was increase the Speaker and the PCM-2 volume to maximum. The channels might vary for you depending on your sound card. If you want to increase microphone volume use

alsamixer -c0 -Vcapture

Playing mp3 and other codecs on Fedora

With the merger of livna, freshrpms and dribble as rpmfusion things got better on Fedora. If you were having an eye on the ubuntu systems for their ease of installation with respect to codecs, we have a breakthrough in Fedora systems.

Enable tapping the touchpad in Fedora 11

For those who want their touch pad enabled with tapping there is a very simple method, something that just slipped my eye. It is so simple that makes me want to kick my self. Just click on System menu -> Preferences -> Mouse. Clicking on the Touchpad tab should open a window as below:

Well then just enable your choice by ticking the options and you have them by default.

But this will not work on KDE or at login. To do so copy

 /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi to /etc/hal/fdi/policy

and edit the file according to your needs.

<merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">1</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton2" type="string">3</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton3" type="string">2</merge>

Add the above lines if they are not present. This will enable tapping, two-finger tap for right click and three for middle click.

Fedora 11 Beta Review

Please read the latest review of Fedora 11 here.

Fedora 11 Beta got released few days after schedule. Code named “Leonidas”, it has a “feature list that dwarfs any previous release.”[1]. A 20 second boot up, improved plymouth, virtualization, support for cross-compiling windows application directly on fedora and many more exciting features go on to the Features list. I will be writing soon on what to expect from fedora 11, so we will skip parts of features now but look onto the experience in using this beta version. Now please do remember this is a beta version, so a lot of changes are made until the final release.

Pictorial guide to installing Fedora 10

Many people have difficulties of Installing Fedora on their machine. Once you have managed to get a CD (in this case a GNOME live CD) following the steps should help you to install Fedora on your system. If you have downloaded the Disc Image (the .iso file) and do not know how to use it, the fedora project documentation page gives you the solution.

What to Expect from Fedora 10…

Let me give you an introduction to how I have tested this version and how much I am adoring this. It all started a few days after the beta version was released. I did try the alpha and did quite like the graphics, I ran it on live environment and thus my experience with the alpha version was short lived. Now the time from the alpha to the beta release I had problems of my own using fedora. I shifted from fedora 9 to 8 and then back to 9 and back and forth again. Yes I know its crazy but it actually happened. I was not quite satisfied with fedora 9. Thus when the beta was released I was eager to try it out.

From the moment the beta established itself onto the hard drive of my laptop(the good old Compaq Presario V3000) I have not turned to fedora 9 or 8. Its ironically been my ’stable’ system. From the artwork to the new GNOME I am simply in love with the new version.

What is the article all about. Its about what you can expect from the new version knowing that there’s just four days for it to be released. So I’ll start talking about the most discussed artwork: the Solar and of course the ‘tabbed’ nautilus to the various other features.

Launchers for Linux I – GnomeDO

When I started using Linux I was amazed by the way I could tweak my system. I love to have my system unique. The days I used windows I had the task bar on the left side and did a lot of other stuffs. I liked the OS X look and thus installed kiba-dock, avant-window-manager and cairo-dock. All of them very brilliant and in many ways beats the Mac dock too. But I wanted more. And thus started my search and eventually found two awesome launchers GnomeDO and Easystroke.

GnomeDO is a Launcher that may strike to be very different from the normal mac clones and others. The functionality of this one beats the others. Let me first start with the process of installation and then carry on to describe what is able to do.

For the fedora users simply yum it:

yum install gnome-do

For the others just follow this link: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomeDo/Installation

Flash plugin for fedora

Adobe has a repository to install the flash plugin using yum. Install the repository:

rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-\
release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Import the key:

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

yum the software:

yum install flash-plugin libflashsupport

Now you would ask me why install libflashsupport. If you don’t you will have no sound when playing Flash in your web browser.

Update: You no longer need to install libflashsupport.

PS: For Newbies please make sure you are executing these commands as a root user, otherwise it will not work