By accident, I ran across several links that seemed very helpful for getting situated in Fedora 15:
- The Linux Experience: How to painlessly switch from Ubuntu to Fedora
- Thomas’ Blog: Switching from Ubuntu to Fedora 15
- Digital Tool Co.: GNOME Shell, GNOME Do, and things to come
- WebUpd8: GPASTE: NATIVE GNOME SHELL CLIPBOARD MANAGER (EXTENSION)
- WebUpd8: GNOME SHELL EXTENSIONS: ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONALITY FOR GNOME 3 (DOCK TASK-SWITCHER, WINDOWS NAVIGATOR, USER THEME, ETC.)
Chrome Extensions Quick Fix
I was able to get Chromium installed, but it keeps mentioning that “Tampermonkey has crashed.” Thomas’ Blog suggested running this command to fix extensions:
restorecon -R -v -F ~
Hallelujah! My Tampermonkey works. I was hoping that it wasn’t my backing up the profile.
Flash
I went to this link as suggested:
Since, I am running the 64bit version, I opted to follow the 64bit link.
This looks a little complicated. I may save this for another day. Please comment if you have any advise here. I was hoping for an RPM I could install that would just stay up to date. Flash is something I just want to take for granted rather than tinker with. The tar bar for Flash 11 has a bunch of directories and files. I need to read up on it more.
Gnome Shell Tweak
Multiple sites recommended this tool. So, I installed it:
su -c 'yum -y install gnome-tweak-tool'
Here are some of the tweaks, I found useful:
- Shell — Show date in clock (turned on)
- Shell — Laptop lid close action (changed from Suspend to Blank)
More Packages and Stuff
Ok, I don’t want to go through each of these individually, so I’ll just throw them out there the same way the Chema did on his blog:
su -c 'yum -y install gnome-tweak-tool gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-extras gstreamer-plugins-bad-nonfree gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-ffmpeg audacious audacious-plugins unrar java-1.6.0-openjdk java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin gparted vlc gimp gimp-data-extras gimp-fourier-plugin gimp-lqr-plugin gimp-resynthesizer gimpfx-foundry yum-plugin-fastestmirror'
–Thanks Chema
I also did the DVD support thing:
su -c 'yum -y install libdvdread libdvdnav'
And, I have the 64bit installed, so I ran this:
su -c 'rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/repo/15/x86_64/libdvdcss-1.2.10-1.x86_64.rpm'
Check out this page for the 32bit command.
SELinux and Performance
I have been struggling with my laptop running slow. It comes to a crawl when I run my Java/Swing application and VMWare at the same time. I found this tidbit about performance on Chema’s blog: “If you are experiencing poor performance, you may want to check what the current SELinux status is”.
I edited the file /etc/selinux/config and changed it from enforcing to permissive:
Thankfully, it seems to have fixed my problem.
Gnome Shell Extensions
Chema’s command does a good job showing the list of extensions. It is a good start for seeing what is available already:
yum search extension | grep gnome-shell
I found a few other resources on extensions:
- Justin Stories: Five must have Gnome shell extensions for Fedora 15
- WebUpd8: 2 MORE GNOME SHELL EXTENSIONS: CPU TEMPERATURE, WINDOW OVERLAY ICONS
I like the alternative status menu. To me, it is kind of absurd to not have a shutdown option in your menu! But, this adds it back:
yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu
Note: After installing this extension, I found on the cheat sheet that you can use the Alt key with the default menu to get a Power Off option.
The places menu is another good one:
yum install gnome-shell-extensions-places-menu
The weather and a11y look good, too, but I may save those for another post since they look a little more in depth.
One more trick I learned is that after installing the extensions, you can restart the shell by pressing Alt-F2 and then typing r.
Gnome Do
I was able to easily install Gnome Do with Add/Remove Software, but I had several issues with getting it to work. One of the issues, I already talked about. You have to install an extra dependency: gnome-desktop-2.
Furthermore, you also have to change the Summons key. Digital Tool Company recommended Alt-F3. You can do that from the preferences menu option once you start Gnome-Do.
Or, when you first open Gnome do, you can use the menu there:
Then, you can change the summons key here:
Stay tuned as I continue to get used to Fedora!