The Subtle Art of Doing Things: November 2008

I downloaded and installed Fedora 10 yesterday. I've been playing with Linux, and specifically Red Hat, since about Red Hat 5 or 6. So, when a new release comes out, I have to grab it and have a play.

I got a MacBook Air back in April and around that time I messed up my installation of Fedora 9, so I stopped using it and started using my MacBook almost exclusively. The problems with Fedora 9 started when I decided to install the 64 bit version of the OS. It was only then that I discovered that Adobe do not provide a 64 bit version of Flash Player, so I had to install the 32 bit version of Firefox to get Flash to work. This seemed to drag loads of other 32 bit packages along for the ride, when I later added the Livna repository this just caused a nightmare and I ended up with a broken Firefox.

So, along comes Fedora 10 and now is the time to sort things out. I back up my home directory to a USB drive and perform a completely new install. First impressions is that it's a shorter process than before! That's because you don't get to make some of the choices that you had previously. One choice that you lose is the configuration of SELinux. I'm sure SELinux is great if security is a major concern, but to a casual tinkerer like me, it just adds to the possible list of OS things that stops other things working so, post install, I turned it off and rebooted. That was ok.

One of the first things I like to do is to get a DVD to play. This is one of Fedora's difficulties. Adding DVD support is sailing close to the wind with regards to patent encumbered software and, out of the box, Fedora doesn't support it. I seem to remember that Fedora 9 quickly took you off to the Fluendo website, where you could purchase additional codecs. This didn't happen this time. I decided to add the Livna repository to the package manager. Here I found out about RPM Fusion, which is combo of a number of Fedora repositories. Hopefully, this effort will produce less compatibility problems in the future. I installed a number of packages that I thought would enable DVD support, all without success. Eventually I downloaded and installed mplayer from their subversion repository and tried that. Still no luck! Although this time, mplayer read the disc and played a soundtrack. I seemed to be going (slightly) in the right direction.

After Fedora 10 was up and running, one of the first things I did was to try and enable 'Desktop Effects' but this did not work. In the past I could only get this feature to work if I installed the NVIDIA Linux driver from their website. So, I grabbed the driver and installed it. This time desktop effects worked AND the DVD players I installed all started to play DVDs! Hooray!

So, moral of the story, unless you are really hung up on open drivers best go and get the driver from the chip vendor's site and get the best out of your hardware.