Tweaking Your Fedora Installation For Maximum Productivity & Features

Written by Eric Griffith in Operating Systems on 16 June 2015 at 09:40 AM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 29 Comments.

No Linux distribution is absolutely perfect for any and all use cases. Some use older software than the user would prefer, some lack the polish that comes with a distribution integrating all the pieces together, some projects might be heading down a direction that the user disagrees with. Many users end up finding themselves in the arms of the Fedora Project or its cousin the CentOS Project, as it provides the tri-fecta of up-to-date software, distribution level integration, and tweak-ability that Linux users so often enjoy.

The Fedora Project has always had a stance, both for legal and philosophical reasons, to not ship or make available by default non-free software such as Google Chrome, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, DVD and MP3 playback, etc. While this stance is arguably a noble one and one to be commended, it does tend to run contrary to what a user might consider a "working desktop."

There are two main ways to achieve all of the software necessary for a daily-usage installation: automatically, or manually.

Fedy (automatically)

Fedy, formally called Fedora Utils, is a desktop application that tries to automate and make-easy the installation of common third party software, repositories, and utilities for the Fedora Desktop. As we covered last week it allows one to install MP3 support, Encrypted DVD Playback, Oracle Java, Adobe Flash, Android Studio, Google Chrome, tweaks such as better font rendering, and user-defined plugins for specific tasks.

Installation of Fedy requires running the command:

wget http://satya164.github.io/fedy/fedy-installer

Then going into the directory you downloaded it to and running:

chmod +x fedy-installer
sudo ./fedy-installer

Fedy will ask to download initial packages as part of the installation but eventually it will finish up and the you will have a "Fedy" entry in your Application Menu.

By default Fedy opens to show the Applications tab, the user can click the "Install" button next to any application. After clicking "install" Fedy will prompt for your user password and then begin downloading it silently behind the scenes. After it has been installed the "install" changes to say "Remove."

The alternative tab for Fedy is the "Tweaks" tab that allows for things like setting the SSD scheduler, enabling tap-to-click, better font rendering, amongst other things.

While Fedy is a bit more on the user-friendly side, minus the need to run terminal commands, it is not the perfect solution for everyone. Sometimes Fedy can bug out, or crash, also with the recent removal of its command-line interface it is no longer a viable scripting interface. Enter solution number 2: the manual way.

Manually Adding Packages

This section is not meant to cover every piece of software that fedy supports. This section simply pulls out some of the highlights and covers them. If you would like an article in regards to your personal favorite application let me know on the forums and I will see about posting an article dedicated to that application.

Adobe Flash
Whether we all like it or not Browser Plugins are still a thing, they are on the decline but for now they exist and are in use. Of course, Adobe Flash is near the top of the list of browser plugins that are used. To enable Adobe Flash on your new Fedora desktop you need to browse to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/.

and select "YUM for Linux (YUM)" via the drop down menu. This will download a .RPM package called "adobe-release." Depending on your environment you might be able to just double click the downloaded RPM package to install it. If that does not work you need to bring up your Terminal and do:

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dnf install adobe-release*.rpm

After the package has been successfully installed you can use either dnf or your graphical package manager to install the package "flash-plugin"

Google Chrome
For this author personally the browser of choice is Firefox, but for some the go-to tends to be Google Chrome. To install it you need to first download the RPM package available here.

Select the appropriate package for your architecture (32 or 64bit) and let it download. You should get a file called "google-chrome-stable." As per the above Adobe Flash instructions, you can attempt to install Google Chrome by double clicking the .rpm. If that should fail you need to run the following commands:

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dnf install google-chrome-stable*.rpm

Either way it will prompt you to download additional packages. When the operation is complete you should have a Google Chrome entry in your Application Menu.

Skype
Microsoft still maintains the Skype client for Linux, though its quality and compatibility with recent distributions is up for debate. For those who need to run Skype it is available from the Skype Desktop Download page.

Where it states "Select Your Distribution" you want to pick Fedora 16 32bit. From there it will download the Skype RPM package. As with Chrome and Flash above, double click the RPM package and let it install any additional packages it requests. Afterwards load up Skype from your applications menu and it should 'just work.'

RPMFusion The Go-To Third party Repository. RPMFusion is a collection of free and non-free software that Fedora cannot ship for various reasons, whether legally or philosophically, such as Steam, media codecs, closed source drivers, etc.

The easiest way to download both the free and non-free RPMFusion repositories in one go, as long as you are on Fedora 14 or higher is to execute the following command:

su -c 'yum install --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm'

If you are terminal-averse or want to download the RPM packages for later use then links to actual .rpm's are available here.

With RPMFusion installed and enabled the possibilities of Fedora open up considerably.

Steam - Requires RPMFusion
With RPMFusion enabled Steam becomes a simple matter of installing the "steam" package, either via your graphical software manager, or via the command:

sudo dnf install steam libtxc_dxtn.i686 ibtxc_dxtn.x86_64

Please note that the version of Steam in RPMFusion is the base upstream release from Valve. If you are a heavy user of a gamepad, such as the Xbox 360 / Xbox One controller, then there is an alternative repository available that has a patched version of the Xpad driver. This alternative version contain patches from Valve to improve the driver and its behavior. This repository also contain the SteamOS session files and binaries for running a Steam-only system.

The alternatively repository is available to be enabled via

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-steam.repo

And then installed via

sudo dnf install steam libtxc_dxtn.i686 ibtxc_dxtn.x86_64


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