Inspired by an old post by Rui Moura, I’ll maintain here the plain commands needed to setup a freshly installed Fedora or Red Hat system, to include essential softwares they don’t ship by default due to legal issues.

These instructions are currently optimized for Fedora 8, but most of it works for Fedora 7 and modern Red Hat Enterprise Linux too. Good suggestions provided as comments bellow will be added to this guide.

Terms highlighted in red should be changed to match your system.

Permissions Setup

This step will allow you to issue some administrative commands without having to be all the time logged in as root — the system administrator.

bash# echo 'your_plain_loginname_here ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Note that this is the only command throughout this guide that shows a root prompt (bash#). All other commands are indicated to be run as a regular non-root user (indicated by bash$).

After configuring sudo, every time you execute an administrative command with its help, a password is requested. This is your password (the regular user’s password), not the root password.

Keeping System Updated

After all the steps bellow and from time to time, update all software installed on your system with the following command:

bash$ sudo yum update

Repositories Setup

Livna and FreshRPMs are repositories of many essential multimedia and general purpose software for Fedora and Red Hat systems.

bash$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

Install Adobe Flash Player Globally

bash$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
bash$ sudo yum -y install flash-plugin

Restart your browser to activate the plugin.
For reference: Flash Player for Linux home page.

Access LAN Hosts by Name Without a DNS Server

You can access servers and machines on you LAN by name, instead of using their long IP address using the Zeroconf standard (implemented as Avahi in Linux). This is so useful and works out of the box in Ubuntu. The setup in Fedora is easy too, but not automatic.

bash$ sudo yum -y install avahi-tools nss-mdns

Now, instead of accessing local hosts by their IP, you can use the .local domain appended to their names. Just like this:

bash$ ssh 10.0.0.5 # stop using the IP address of dbserver
bash$ ssh dbserver.local # start using its hostname

Tip grabbed from Fedora Project wiki.

Keep Date and Time Correct and Precise

Your system can have 100% correct time and date everyday, synchronizing with atomic clocks across the Internet.

bash$ sudo yum -y install ntp    # install time sync tools
bash# ntpdate 0.fedora.pool.ntp.org    # make the first time sync with a Fedora clock mirror
bash# chkconfig --level 2345 ntpd on    # enable the synchronization service to run on every boot
bash# service ntpd start    # run the service so you don't need to reboot

Read more in the official Linux Time Precision HOWTO.

Dramatically Improve Fonts

bash$ sudo yum install freetype-freeworld

Logoff and login again your graphical environment to this update take effect.

To understand why you need this update read this section on the Linux Font HOWTO.

The freetype-freeworld package uses a technique described in this bug report.

Install Web Standard Fonts

These packages include popular fonts as Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Verdana, as well as new Windows Vista and MS Office 2007 fonts. Learn more.

bash$ sudo rpm -Uvh \
http://avi.alkalay.net/software/webcore-fonts/webcore-fonts-3.0-1.noarch.rpm \
http://avi.alkalay.net/software/webcore-fonts/webcore-fonts-vista-3.0-1.noarch.rpm

Then, configure your desktop as described in the Linux Font HOWTO, for KDE or Gnome.

MP3 Support

For Gnome and GStreamer:

bash$ sudo yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-ugly libmad libid3tag id3v2

For KDE:

bash$ sudo yum -y install kdemultimedia-extras-nonfree id3v2

Amarok: The best audio player for Linux

bash$ sudo yum -y install amarok-extras-nonfree

DVD Player

bash$ sudo yum -y install vlc

General DVD and Movie Player and Browser Plugin

bash$ sudo yum -y install mplayer mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in

General Digital Video Authoring and Editing tools

bash$ sudo yum -y install mencoder mkvtoolnix mkvtoolnix-gui ffmpeg avidemux

Correctly install Java

Fedora 8 includes what will be the new Sun Java 1.7 JVM that was open sourced in late 2006.

This JVM (codename Iced Tea) is still beta and may not fulfill all your needs, but it is now extremely easy to install:

bash$ sudo yum -y install java-1.7.0-icedtea    # installs the JRE only

Other subpackages you can install with similar command are java-1.7.0-icedtea-devel (JDK), java-1.7.0-icedtea-plugin (browser plugin), java-1.7.0-icedtea-demo, java-1.7.0-icedtea-src, java-1.7.0-icedtea-javadoc.

If the 1.7 does not fulfill your needs, I wrote another similar tutorial on how to correctly install traditional Java that will become obsolete as soon the Iced Tea project is final, but may be enlightening about how to install other Java related libraries and packages.

Access Windows NTFS Partitions From Linux

bash$ sudo yum -y install ntfs-config

Then run the ntfs-config-root graphical tool and configure your partitions to be writable and mountable.

bash$ sudo /usr/sbin/ntfs-config-root

An example of my system:

After you configure the tool and quit, your NTFS partitions will be mounted in the specified place. In my case /media/Windows and /media/Work.

Configure text console in high resolution and smaller fonts

This tip is for the text console.

bash$ sudo echo 'SYSFONT="lat0-08"' >> /etc/sysconfig/i18n  # set a ISO-8859-15 font
bash$ sudo echo 'fbset 1024x768-60' >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local    # set console resolution to 1024x768 @ 60Hz

These settings will take effect after a reboot, but you can test them before rebooting executing the following commands:

bash$ sudo setfont lat0-08
bash$ sudo fbset 1024x768-60

Note that you can set different resolutions than 1024×768 if you have a video card and monitor that will accept it. A full list of modes can be listed with the command:

bash$ grep "mode " /etc/fb.modes