The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 7

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 7 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Click on Next to start the installation to your hard disk:

Your hard disk is being formatted:

Afterwards, Fedora is installed. This can take a few minutes:

Some post-installation steps (such as installing the GRUB boot loader) are performed:

3 Update The System

After the new reboot, log in with your username and password:

This is how your new Fedora 7 desktop looks like:

Now open a terminal (Applications > System Tools > Terminal) and become root:

su

What we do now is this: we open the configuration files for Fedora's online package repositories and disable GPG checks for downloaded packages. If we don't do this, we will get Unable to verify ... errors whenever we want to install/update a package, resulting in a failure of the whole operation.

6 Installing Additional Software

Now that we have added additional repositories, a lot more packages are available in our package manager for installation, especially a big deal of our needed packages. To install them, go to Applications > Add/Remove Software:

Type in the root password:

The Package Manager opens. Go to the Search tab. Select the following packages for installation (* is a wildcard; e.g. mplayer* means all packages that start with mplayer) and click on Apply afterwards:

8 Flash Player

To see if the Flash plugin (which we installed before) is working, start Firefox. Then type about:plugins in the address bar. Firefox will then list all installed plugins, and it should list the Flash Player (version 9.0r31 which is the newest one at the time of this writing) among them:

You can now open a web site of which you know that it uses Flash. For example, www.spiegel.de has video news in Flash. You should be able to see (and hear) the Flash movies:

11 Adobe Reader

To download Adobe Reader, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html and select the following:

Operating system: Unix/Linux
Version: Linux (.rpm)
Your language

Then click on Continue:

Then click on the Download Adobe Reader button and install the package exactly as shown for the TrueType fonts and RealPlayer in the two previous chapters:

15 Google Earth

To install Google Earth, open a terminal and become root:

su

Then run

cd /home/falko/Desktop
wget http://dl.google.com/earth/GE4/GoogleEarthLinux.bin
sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin

This will download Google Earth and start the installation. Before the installation starts, you must accept the license agreement, so click on I Agree:

Accept all default settings and click on Begin Install:

19 VMware Server

With VMware Server you can let your old Windows desktop (that you previously converted into a VMware virtual machine with VMware Converter, as described in this tutorial: http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_converter_windows_linux) run under your Fedora desktop. This can be useful if you depend on some applications that exist for Windows only, or if you want to switch to Linux slowly.