My checklist for Fedora desktop

I have been using GNU/Linux since 2001, and experimented various versions of RedHat Linux and Fedora and currently using Fedora 8. Whenever I upgrade( or sometimes do a fresh install) it's very difficult to setup the commonly used applications, so I have compiled a list of applications in a text file in my desktop. I thought that this would be helpful for others also, so I added some brief notes.

1. Xine - Multimedia player:
xine has been my favourite multimedia player for several years. Unfortunately due to legal issues xine is not included in the Fedora repository but it is available in the Freshrpms fedora repository. The Freshrpms also contains several other add-ons for Fedora. It's quite easy to setup the yum to access Freshrpms repository, just run the following command from a terminal:

rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/8/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

Once the repo is enabled the following command can be used to install xine.
# yum install xine

2. xmms-mp3 - MP3 plugin for xmms:
XMMS is one of the simplest audio player available for GNU/Linux. The XMMS package should be installed prior to xmms-mp3. This apckage is available in freshrpms repo. I used the following command to install xmms and it's plugin.
# yum install xmms xmms-mp3

3. dvdrip - DVD ripping utility
This package is also available in freshrpms. The following command will install dvdrip.

# yum install dvdrip

4. gstreamer-plugins-ugly - Proprietary codecs for gstreamer
Totem and other native gnome media players doesn't play the media files enoded in proprieatary formats. gstreamer-plugins-ugly will help you to overcome this limitation.

# yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

5. rar and unrar - compression utility
Occassionaly some of my friends sent files compressed using the M$ Windows compression utility. Freshrpms has the rar package which can be used to compress and decompress files in rar format.

# yum install rar unrar

6. libquicktime - Library for reading and writing QuickTime files
The libquicktime package is necessary for reading quicktime files(*.mov) in GNU/Linux. This package is also provided by Freshrpms.

# yum install libquicktime

7. Flash Player:
Even though I'm not a big fan of flash movies, occasionally I have to visit websites that supports flash movies. The adobe website provides a yum repository of the flash plugins so that you can view flash movies in your web browser.

Install the adobe-release package using the following command:
rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Now you can install flashplayer using the following command:
# yum install flash-plugin

8. Java:
Java can be downloaded from java official website. I prefer to install sun java in /opt since Fedora already has a java version (icedtea).

9. Malayalam support:
Using Malayalam in my computer was my dream and it seems that it's almost perfect now. Most of theissues are resolved but I have to do some kind of tweaking to read and write Malayalam in Fedora. I have to install the latest updates of pango and libicu packages from the smc repository. (The packages in this repository will soon be available in the official fedora repository also). Pango is the rendering engine for GNOME and libicu is the rendering engine for OpenOffice.org
Download the smc repo file from here and copy it to /etc/yum.repos.d/.
After setting up the repository update the pango and libicu packages using the following command:

# yum update libicu pango

The lohit-malayalam fonts distributed with Fedora is buggy and you have to install the Mal0tf or Rachana_g02(traditional) fonts to render malayalam properly. You can download these fonts from here . The installation instructions can be found in my previous post.

10. Firefox Padma
There has been issues in reading Malayalam websites (www.manoramaonline.com, www.deepika.com etc ..) which uses the dynamic fonts. The Firefox community has come up with an add-on called Padma, which can be used to convert the dynamic fonts to unicode fonts so that they can be read correctly. To install Padma in your firefox, open the url https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/873 in Firefox and click the "Install Now" button.

11. K3B
Even though my favourite desktop environment is GNOME, my all time favourite in KDE is K3B, which is the superior CD/DVD burning software in GNU/Linux. K3B is available in the official Fedora repository and it can be installed using yum.

These are just the preliminary list. I will keep on adding to this whenever I get time.

Experimenting with Fedora 8

The Fedora Community released the latest version of Fedora on Thursday, 8th November 2007. The new Fedora 8 came with numerous enhancements and features and I was thrilled to start experimenting the new distro. Since I don't want to hinder my work at the office, I tried to upgrade my desktop using YUM. The upgrade instructions can be found here : YumUpgradeFaq

The upgrade process was smooth, except it took too much time, because of slow Internet connection. The process took place in one of the text console, and I was able to work on the desktop without any problem. The process took about 6 hours and then I rebooted the machine.
The desktop graphics looks very cool and nice. But there are couple of issues that I had to came across with the new desktop. Some of them are listed below:

1. Unable to set the Screen Resolution
But I was struck with the screen resolution in the newly upgraded machine. I tried to set the resolution to 1024x768, but each time I login, the screen resolution immediately changed to 800x600 after a while. I had a Intel Original Motherboard and /etc/sysconfig/hwconf said that the Graphical Controller is "Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL Integrated Graphics Controller".

I tried to upgrade the kernel and different options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. But all the experiments failed. Finally, with the help of the guys from #fedora@freenode.net I tried to install 915resolution. After installing 915resolution using YUM, I have to reconfigure the display and now the screen resolution issue is solved. Thanks to the guys at #fedora.

Info: The Summary in the 915resolution rpm package says the reason:

Intel video BIOS hack to support certain resolutions.

915resolution is a tool to modify the video BIOS of the 800 and 900 series Intel graphics chipsets. This includes the 845G, 855G, and 865G chipsets, as well as 915G, 915GM, and 945G chipsets. This modification is necessary to allow the display of certain graphics resolutions for an Xorg or XFree86 graphics server.

915resolution's modifications of the BIOS are transient. There is no risk of permanent modification of the BIOS. This also means that 915resolution must be run every time the computer boots inorder for it's changes to take effect.

915resolution is derived from the tool 855resolution. However, the code differs substantially. 915resolution's code base is much simpler. 915resolution also allows the modification of bits per pixel.

2. Too Small desktop Fonts in GNOME-2.20
Fedora 8 uses GNOME-2.20 and I was faced with unusual(small) size of the fonts in the desktop and Google fetched me to the fedoraforums.org. The small fonts issue can be resolved by setting the default font dpi to 96 (This value can be found at /etc/X11/Xresources, the Xft.dpi: 96). The exact reason why this happens in GNOME is still unknown to me. May be I have to dig the gnome bugzilla.

Apart from the font issue, the GNOME desktop looks extraordinary, one of the best experience ever had, since I started using it on 2001.

3. Reading and Typing Malayalam
I was very much disappointed when I accessed the Malayalam Wikipedia page in Firefox. In Fedora 7, there were some issues, but in Fedora 8 it was really worse. The default Malayalam font used in Fedora 8 was lohit-malayalam and I removed it and installed Rachana-g02, but it didn't helped. This was a known bug(#242016) in lohit-malayalam and pango in Fedora 7 and 8, and I have added some screenshots for a comparison of the issues.

With guidance from the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) community I tried the Suruma patch. Since there was no Suruma patch for Pango-1.18, I tried patch4pango-1.16.4.

Installing Suruma was very easy, I need to just run the install script and the installation wizard guided me to complete the operation. Then I installed the Rachana-g02 fonts which render traditional Malayalam glyphs.

To install Rachana fonts, download the fonts from here
Copy the fonts files(*.ttf) to /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm/
Change to /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm and run the following commands

# cd /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm
# mkfontscale
# mkfontsdir
# chkfontpath -a /usr/share/fonts/malayalam-sm
# fc-cache

Open your Mozilla Firefox and access http://ml.wikipedia.org to check whether the fonts are correctly displayed.

In order to type Malayalam, you should first set the Input Method:
To chose the Input method go to System --> Preferences -->Personal --> Input Method.


Enable SCIM and now click the Input Method Preference :

In the Global Setup you can configure the trigger key, which is CTRL+SPACE by default. In the IMEngine menu, you have to chose which languages you need support. You can also chose transliteration or the inscript method. Apply all the changes and re-login to your desktop. If everything is OK, then you will be able to read and type Malayalam in your desktop.

Hello World

I am a Free Software enthusiast working as R&D Manager in one of the growing organizations in Kerala. I am excited to experiment and evaluate Free, Libre and Open Source Software(FLOSS). I would like to share my experiences with FLOSS in this blog.