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Fedora 17: post installation tasks

Monday, September 3rd, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy | 1 Comment

Okay, as promised, my personal Fedora 17 post-installation tasks are:

1. Change terminal environment

First thing I do is open a terminal and wonder who likes to work on a small piece of paper? This is a terminal, not a word processor. Edit -> Profiles… -> Default, 132×43 size, colour scheme: Gray on black, transparency 10%, Scrollback 5120, done.

2. Install Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus seems to me like the essential FireFox plug-in in any kind of browsing environment.

3. Hide unwanted devices in Nautilus

Get rid of windoze partitions and the like showing up in Nautilus. See my previous post on this topic.

4. Install Fedora Utils

Fedora Utils is a script that lets you install essential (proprietory/closed-source) software. Use it to get access to multi-media codecs and DVD playback or software like Google Earth and Skype. Nice! Save a lot of handiwork. There maz be better alternatives around, but as this is my first Fedora run I cannot say which one does the job best.

5. Install TrueCrypt

Nice encryption tool. Make sure you disable the requiretty option in the sudoers file for GUI support.

6. Install Audacious

My favourite Linux Winamp clone. Love it or leave it.

sudo yum install audacious

7. Install Nautilus Open in Terminal extension

Fiddling in Nautilus and need a Terminal? Right click -> Open in Terminal. Done.

sudo yum install nautilus-open-terminal

8. Install VirtualBox

If you installed Fedora Utils you should already have a current VirtualBox in your repositories.

sudo yum install VirtualBox

Download and install the extension pack for USB support.
Make sure you are a member of the vboxusers group:

usermod -a -G vboxusers username

9. Install Thunderbird

Fedora ships with Evolution, I prefer Thunderbird.

sudo yum install thunderbird

10. Install Office suite

I guess Libre Office is the suite to go with.

sudo yum install libreoffice

11. Install Gimp

What? No Gimp? That@s pretty darn “pure” too me

sudo yum install gimp

12. pimp Gnome

I only install a bare minimum of Gnome Extensions, namely

1. Windows Alt Tab

A replacement for Alt-Tab, allows to cycle between windows and does not group by application. First I tried AlternateTab, but that gave a small preview of the window instead of the program’s icon. It can be quite tedious to search for a window’s content rather than an easily recognizable icon.

2. Native Window Placement

Arrange windows in overview in a more compact way.

3. Remove Accessibility

Remove the accesibility button from the top panel.

4. Status Icon Fixer

Fixes Dropbox, Skype, vlc and others into the status bar; not perfect, but ok
I like this little devil a lot. I used it to fix Audaciuos status icon to appear where I want it to. Edit ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/status@gnome-shell.2jk.org/extension.js to suit your needs.

13. increase terminal history size

From a previous post: Remember that wicked command you entered a few weeks ago? No? Increase your history size to something that lives up to the term “history”. Open your ~/.bashrc and enter something like export HISTFILESIZE=10000

I’d like to point out one more time that Fedora 17 ships with working multi-monitor support and vi movements are working out of the box as well, no more echo set nocompatible >> ~/.vimrc needed. I also already encountered a few problems, like VirtualBox no longer working after Kernel update or FreeMind having some dependency issues at some point. I have to say that it seems bleeding edge comes with a few characteristics that render the OS not work-compliant. Maybe next time I’ll go for a plain Ubuntu LTS and hope it just works…

Tags: adblock plus, fedora, fedora utils, gnome 3, installation, libre office, linux, nautilus, terminal, thunderbird, ubuntu, virtualbox

Goodbye Mint, Hello Fedora

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 | Misc | No Comments

Seems Mint 13 finally finished me. I have to say that Mint 10 was the last “flawless” version of Mint (I’ve been there since Mint 4 “Daryna”). Right now I am still using Mint 12 on my home machine, tried 13 on my business laptop – and decided that I don’t want to take part in the desktop environment wars any more. Again, the multi-monitor setup in Mint was a pain and trying to preserve the Gnome 2 / XP way of working is a huge step back IMHO. I am okay with Gnome 3 (didn’t try Unity yet) and I was looking for a “pure” unfiddled Linux experience. After checking some major distros I decided to give Fedora 17 a more serious go and I have to say I did not regret it. “Mint” Linux, no clutter, bleeding edge (wow, finally including a mulit-monitor setup that seems to work). You could argue that setting up the system takes longer, because Fedora does not ship with things like proper multimedia support or propitiatory software like Flash, VirtualBox or Skype. I think that’s pretty kewl. You should understand why mp3 playback is not available out-of-the-box and that you have to explicitly install it at your own will.

Anyway, right now I am compiling a few Fedora 17 post installation tasks that will show there’s a bit more to do (no Gnome 3 extension installed by default – very pure indeed ), stay tuned.

Tags: fedora, gnome 3, installation, linux, mint, unity

Linux Mint 12: More post installation tasks

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 | Linux, Tech-savvy | No Comments

I started to write down my personal Linux Mint post installation tasks as of version 10. After installing a few Mint 12 machines I had to update the list. As always, highly personal, take whatever info might be useful, ignore the rest.

1. Add favorite programs to autostart

GNOME 3 has no point-and-click tool to add autostart options, at least no default shortcut for it. Alt-F2 and gnome-session-properties does the trick. I have essentials like my browser, media player and ssh-add in my autostart.

2. Disable extension overkill

Whether you use MATE, GNOME 3 or Cinnamon is up to you. I kinda like the new GNOME, but not all the default “extensions” that come with Mint 12 extend my user experience in a good way I decided the following options work the best for me:



3. Install VirtualBox with USB support

Well, installing VirtualBox is a little confusing, as you have multiple versions (virtualbox-ose, -nonfree, -4.1) in your available software list. Some people suggest adding new repos and installing the latest version, I just stick to what’s being delivered by the default repos. Makes me feel better for some reason.

The VirtualBox site states that the “standard” installation names are the ones with the major version at the end, so I just went for the -4.1 (writing this 4.1.14 is the latest stable, the official Mint repos provide 4.1.6, yeah, whatever…)

If you want USB support you have to add the appropriate extension pack. Go to http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/ and get it for your installed version. You also have to make all users that want to use VirtualBox members of the vboxusers group. As there is no GNOME 3 default group editor simply open a shell and enter

nick $ sudo adduser username vboxusers

Your group memberships will be updated the next time you log in.

Finally, add USB devices in your VBox config’s USB section (select the desired machine, click “Change”, choose “USB”). After that you should be ready to go. What a drag.

4. Use the users group as the default group

I share my computer. I share a lot of files, like pictures and stuff. I don’t like that my user – nick – also has his primary group called “nick”. So ownership of files is nick:nick. This makes little sense to me and I’d rather have it like this: nick:users and nickswife:users so that I can easily access the same files as my picture taking wingman. So issue

nick $ sudo usermod -g users username

for each user that should have the “users” group as the default group. (The sticky bit approach cd /our/pics; chgrp -R users .; find . -type d -exec chmod 2770 {} \;; find . -type f -exec chmod 660 {} \;was not sufficient for me, by using the same primary group I hope we won’t have any permission troubles in the future again)

5. Increase history size

Remember that wicked command you entered a few weeks ago? No? Increase your history size to something that lives up to the term “history”. Open your ~/.bashrc and enter something like export HISTFILESIZE=10000

That’s it for today. Have phun!

Tags: autostart, bash, gnome 3, groups, history, installation, mint, sticky bit, virtualbox