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Fedora Core 2: Making it work

Getting FC2 to a state of desktop readiness is a task that requires a medium amount of skill and will probably take close to a full day for the first workstation (assuming that you have a high-speed Internet connection). Subsequent installs should go more quickly; indeed, I intend for my students to get most of it done during their first three-hour class.

Step 1: Installation

If you intend to work in the GNOME environment I have some suggestions to mitigate some of its problems. You will need the gconf-editor package to do this, so if you're installing GNOME (I do, just in case some of its libraries are needed) be sure to include that package. You can also save yourself some time by installing nedit, in the Applications/Editors package group, as an alternative to gedit.

But frankly, the best way to mitigate the myriad problems in GNOME 2.6 is to include KDE in your install, and make it the default environment at your first opportunity to do so. I find myself far more productive in KDE than in GNOME these days. It is wise to install KDE before creating any non-root users, in order to get KDE's goodies onto their default desktops.

If you produce HTML or XML (especially DocBook) content in your work, you will want to make sure you include Quanta in your install. In fact, I'm writing this article in Quanta. Curiously, it's in the "Graphical Internet" package group instead of the "Editors" group, making it easy to miss.

If your work involves making PDFs from OpenOffice.org (OOo) documents, there's an easy fix for the "huge PDF file size" problem: Skip installing Red Hat's version of OOo. Install it later from the official binaries supplied by the OOo project, and OOo won't embed fonts into PDF files that Acrobat Reader already has. This makes even more sense now that OOo 1.1.2 has been released.

Finally, if your workstation has a serial mouse, you will want to use the text-based, rather than the graphical, installer.

Step 2: Post-install configuration

The first thing you should do with any new install is to download and apply all of the available security updates. Fortunately, FC2's up2date utility is vastly improved from prior versions, and no extra configuration is required to begin using it. Just click on the throbbing red icon that appears on your panel and answer the questions it asks. This is a slow process even with high-speed Internet, so you might as well add some third-party repositories to your yum configuration while you wait (next section). Check up2date every few minutes, because it pauses in a lot of places, waiting for you to click a button before it continues.

If you're on a dialup connection this will take several hours to a day or more. If you have more than one machine to configure and know the rpm command well, you might consider manually downloading and installing the updates instead.

Adding third-party repositories to your configuration

Because the Fedora Project is committed to supplying only 100% open source products in its distributions, you must obtain useful applications like Acrobat Reader, Flash player, and MP3 support from third parties.

It is personally amazing to me how quickly the Fedora-using community assembles applications into Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) packages for FC2. Even better, most of these are available on special sites called repositories that interact with the yum command to automatically resolve dependencies (other packages that your package needs, and must be downloaded and installed, in order to run). The trick is in finding the repositories and adding them to your yum configuration.

There's an excellent list of repositories already assembled into a custom yum configuration file at the unofficial Fedora FAQ site. There is also a Fedora tracker search engine that not only finds the repository containing the package you want, but claims to generate a custom yum configuration file for you!

Unfortunately, there are a few repositories that reportedly do not play nicely with certain other repositories. These incompatibilities seem to fall mostly between the "purist" sites (only 100% open source) and the "questionable license" sites.

Finally, there is the matter of those few packages that are not available on a repository, and must be downloaded and installed the old-fashioned way with rpm. (I can hear it now: "You softies! Why, back in my day we had to install software with the RPM command! With a command-line interface! At 56Kbps both ways, by thunder!") Among these are Java (available from Dag Wieers' site), Wine (available from newrpms), Acrobat Reader, and RealPlayer.

The last two items are worth discussing further. For some reason, Adobe's official Acrobat Reader binaries have never worked in any version of Fedora, at least not for me or my students. Fortunately, the RPM of Acrobat Reader that comes with SUSE Linux 9.0 works just fine in FC2 and FC1. You can find it on any SUSE mirror, buried under an inordinate number of subdirectories named "SUSE" in a directory named "i586."

You can download a beta of the open-source Helix player (formerly known as RealPlayer) with plugins that enable it to play older, proprietary RealPlayer content. It worked flawlessly when I tried it, but I didn't test it thoroughly.

Change the default environment to KDE

As root, edit /etc/sysconfig/desktop to contain only the following line, including the quote marks:

DESKTOP="KDE"

Step 3: User-level configuration

Finally, each user has to do a lot of tweaking before his new FC2 environment is very usable. If you have a lot of users it might be possible to script this, or create a custom "skeleton file" (actually a directory, /etc/skel, which holds the default configuration for newly created users) to ease the burden a bit.

White noise "hiss" from sound card

Of all of FC2's warts, this has turned out to be the most annoying problem. I don't know how many people suffer from it, but it happens with every sound card I have. I hereby thank Peg Gallo for sending the fix to me: In KDE, start KMix (Main Menu --> Sound & Video --> KMix), click the Input tab, and check the "Advanced" box. You will see one or more devices called "IEC958." One of them is the culprit; turn them off until you find the right one.

GNOME's problems

If you insist on working in the GNOME environment, you can turn off the annoying "spatial mode" in the file manager using the GConf Editor (in GNOME: Main Menu --> System Tools --> Configuration Editor). In the left-hand panel, open the following containers: Apps --> Nautilus --> Preferences. In the right-hand panel, check the always_use_browser box.

If rhythmbox throws a "Could not pause playback" error when you try to play a song, that is also fixed in the GConf Editor. See bug #119958 for the solution.

I have not found a way to get GNOME's new help system to display man pages. In the end, this was my biggest reason for switching to KDE.

Conclusion

So there you have it. With a little work (OK, a lot of work) Fedora Core 2 can be made useful for a production environment. In my view, it's worth the work. It runs noticeably faster than kernel 2.4 distributions and has been rock-stable for me. And with all of the work, it's still a lot less annoying than keeping a Windows system running. Indeed, as I've been writing this my son has been struggling to get his sound card working on his dual-boot system. After days of troubleshooting, it still doesn't work in Windows -- but it works fine in his new Fedora Core 2 installation!