How to play music and video(MP3, MPEG, AVI, FLV and other multimedia files) in Fedora 8?

Due to patent encumbrance codecs required to play some proprietary file formats are not shipped with Fedora 8. Codecs are the programs that encode and decode digital data. These codecs are available in the livna repository for Fedora 8. You will be able to play mpeg, mp3, avi, flv and other commonly used file formats for music and video. You will require an Internet connection to download and install these packages on your computer.

If you are using Fedora 7 proceed to this blog post.

Let us get started. Are you ready?

Everybody has their own personal preferences in all walks of life. Desktop computer is no different. Every time I install Fedora, I immediately change few settings. The default settings in some applications may not appeal to every body. They certainly don't, for me at least. I will not discuss configuring network, Internet, printer, audio and video drivers in this post because they are more of necessity than personal preferences. Here goes the list.

Nautilus: The first time you open nautilus(aka File Manager), you will notice each folder opening in different windows. Click on your home folder icon on the desktop and click on few other folders. Your desktop looks clumsy with a whole slew of unwanted windows. The fix:

Remote Desktop, a software included with Fedora, enables you to connect to remote computer over the internet. Remote desktop will allow you to see and control your connected PC as though you were sitting directly in front of it. In this post, I will discuss how to set up remote desktop on Fedora 7. Here, I will refer to local system as “my computer” and other as “remote computer”. The connection will be established over TCP port 5900. Before you proceed, make sure that the port is not blocked by a firewall. I will walk you through the steps to set up remote desktop.

Steps to be performed on "remote computer", i.e., the computer which will be accessed from "my computer":

1. Launch the Remote Desktop Preferences by clicking

Disclaimer: What you will find mostly in this post is - RANT.

I have been using Evolution email client for more than three years from now. I have moved my mails stored in the .evolution folder from computer to computer. Evolution has handled literally millions of emails for me in these years. On the flip side, I have suffered many agonies with Evolution. After every few days Evolution would download all the messages in my POP account again and mark them as unread. The re-downloading thingy has strained my bandwidth several times. Sometimes the password prompt for the email accounts would appear for no reason I could ever imagine. Any password I typed in those prompts would always return an error message followed by another two prompts to type in the password. I swear I had typed the correct password. Oh my, Evolution was supposed to remember my passwords as per my saved preferences. The "summary mismatch" error message is another frequent troublemaker. After restarting the application few times it seemed to correct itself somehow.

Pirut otherwise known as Package Manager in Fedora is the tool used to install, update and remove software programs. Pirut is the default Fedora GUI as of Fedora Core 5. Some users have been wanting to use the DVD/CD media as one of the repositories from Pirut. This is possible by editing few lines in your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file. There is a nice post by Thomas Chung at http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/1055 that walks you through the steps to accomplish that objective.

This is a default feature in Fedora 8. Whenever you search for software from Pirut or Package Manager or Add/Remove Software menu, the Fedora install media is searched first. If the software program you are looking for is shipped with Fedora the system prompts you to insert the install media. If the program is found in the CD/DVD the software is installed from the media rather than downloading from the Fedora repositories online. I am happy with this feature which helps save lot of bandwidth especially when you are unsure whether the package is shipped with the install media. If you keep the install media with you when you install software shipped with Fedora media you also save lot of time. This yet another reason to upgrade to Fedora 8, if you are still using older releases of Fedora.

Mozilla Firefox is indeed one of the best browsers available today. Firefox web browser is my favorite too. Tab browsing and pop-up blocker have won the hearts of many avid Internet surfers. Spell checking, session restore, integrated search, phishing protection and automatic updates are some of the widely used and popular features. Firefox can be immensely personalized by installing Add-ons.

I have compiled a list of Firefox Add-ons that I frequently use. It takes several days to explore all the Add-ons. Start your journey by clicking on Tools>Add-ons>Get Extensions from your Firefox browser window. Or visit the Firefox Add-ons page directly.

Password Exporter: You know how hard it is to remember thousand and one usernames and passwords. Every other website has a registration and login system. I have seen people writing down the passwords and usernames because their memories are not as much reliable. Some people even use password management software. It is very convenient to store all your website passwords and usernames in Firefox browser. Firefox remembers the form data including the usernames and passwords. When you upgrade your operating system or when you move to a different computer you can use this handy Add-on. Install this Add-on and export your passwords to a file. On the other computer, install the same Add-on and import the file. All your usernames and passwords will be magically retained.

Fedora 8 was released on November 8, 2007. Every six months or so a new Fedora version is released. Fedora project is sponsored by Red Hat and is developed in collaboration with the community.

My computer was running on Fedora 6 from the past one year. I switched straight to Fedora 8 skipping Fedora 7. I did help few of my friends to install Fedora 7 though. Fedora 8 is bundled with new features - GNOME 2.20, Online Desktop, KDE 3.5.8, NetworkManager 0.7, PulseAudio, CodecBuddy, Compiz Fusion, IcedTea, Linux tickless kernel, Nodoka GNOME theme, graphical firewall configuration tool, Eclipse 3.3, numerous security enhancements and many more.

After downloading the Fedora 8 X86_64 torrent I burned the image to a DVD using GNOME baker, backed up my data and started the installation. The graphical installation aborted before creating user accounts with no useful error message. I had to use the text mode to install Fedora on my PC with AMD 64 bit processor and NVIDIA chipset. In all previous Fedora installations I could create user accounts before booting the operating system for the first time. I had to use the root account to create users and then login to the system. The default runlevel was set to 3 which left me with only the command line. I changed it to 5 by editing /etc/inittab file. When I logged into the system I saw big icons on the desktop which was caused by low screen resolution. Apart from these minor quirks everything else worked absolutely fine.

I installed the usual applications - Thunderbird, NVIDIA drivers from Livna, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash Player and few others. Then I imported my backed up data. I was all set.

The look and feel is impressive with Infinity and Nodoka GNOME theme which was created specially for Fedora. Compiz Fusion, the compositing window manager that re-merges Compiz and Beryl, was installed by default. I clicked System>Preferences>Look and Feel>Desktop Effects>Enable Desktop Effects and put a check mark next to "Windows Wobble when Moved" and "Workspaces on a Cube". The desktop transformed with great appearance and impressive effects.

How to record audio(from Mic) and video(from screen) from the desktop on Linux(Fedora Core 6)?

I was looking for a screen recording software. I wanted the software to capture video from the screen and audio from Mic. I had heard about recoding audio and video separately by using tools like Audacious. I knew there was a software which could do it simultaneously. I googled around and found out gtk-recordMyDesktop was what I needed. As usual, I clicked Applications->Add/Remove Software to launch Package Manager. I searched for "recordmydesktop" and selected gtk-recordmydesktop-0.3.3.1-4.fc6 from the search results to install it.

gtk-RecordMyDesktop did a great job by recording video but not audio. I started the troubleshooting process. I clicked Advanced on the gtk-recordMyDesktop window and then clicked Sound tab. There was an option to use Jack for audio capture. I selected Jack for audio capture and it only gave me error messages stating jack_lsp returned no ports. It also asked me to make sure jackd is running. I tried various commands to start jackd but I couldn't. I gave up using Jack with gtk-recordMyDesktop.

OpenOffice.org is a multi-platform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

If you are using expensive office suite with complex and restrictive licenses, start using OpenOffice.org today. OpenOffice.org is free to use. You can go to the OpenOffice.org web site and download the software and follow the on screen instructions to install it. OpenOffice.org runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix computers. If you are using another office suite like Microsoft Office, you can easily migrate to OpenOffice.Org. OpenOffice.org can read files saved in the Microsoft Office format. OpenOffice.org uses the file format approved by the International Organization for Standardization(ISO) to store data. Most proprietary office suite does not support the OpenDocument format. You can easily export your documents in PDF format using OpenOffice.org.