So, you’ve got Fedora Core 8 installed, it all looks pretty sweet and you start browsing the internet. You quickly notice that there are quite a few things that don’t work out of the box, like for instance Flash or Java. A shame you think, let’s play some MP3′s then. You click an MP3 and Amarok fires up, then you get the notice it doesn’t support MP3… doh.

Time to get your FC8 box up to date so you don’t have any limitations!

Livna

Because of many licensing limitations, FC8 doesn’t come with any commercial codecs or similar commercial parts. The Fedora Core repositories only contain ‘open’ software as well, so we need to enable the Livna repository on our box!

$ rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm

Playing MP3′s
By default Fedora Core 8 uses Amarok to play audio (If you use KDE), a pretty decent player but it doesn’t support MP3 by default.

$ sudo yum install amarok-extras-nonfree

Don’t want to use Amarok? Use xmms then.

$ yum install xmms xmms-mp3 xmms-skins

Adobe Flash
Like I said, Fedora Core 8 doesn’t have Flash support by default, we need to get the Flash Plugin!

The current version at this time is 9.0.48 for Linux, download the RPM.

$ wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-9.0.48.0-release.i386.rpm

$ sudo rpm -ivh flash-plugin-9.0.48.0-release.i386.rpm

Restart Firefox and you’re ready to go!

Java

As of Fedora Core 8 you will end up with IcedTea which is based on OpenJDK, I however prefer Sun Java. A lot of sites don’t work properly with IcedTea, like for instance Logmein and Pogo.

Sun offers the Java Runtime Environment in RPM format, which you can download at their website.

I’m going to download the “Linux RPM (self-extracting file)“, for me that downloads the file “jre-6u3-linux-i586-rpm.bin”. I open up my terminal and locate the file (it’s on my desktop).

• Get the RPM out of the BIN.

  $ sudo sh jre-6u3-linux-i586-rpm.bin

  We accept the terms and conditions and end up with a file called “jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm”.

• Time to install the RPM on the location we want.

  $ sudo rpm -ivh ~/Desktop/jre-6u3-linux-i586.rpm

  We notice that Java has been installed in /usr/java/

  $ cd /usr/java/
  $ ls -al

  total 32

  drwxr-xr-x  3 root root 4096 2007-11-19 21:48 .

  drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 2007-11-19 21:48 ..

  lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   16 2007-11-19 21:48 default -> /usr/java/latest

  drwxr-xr-x  7 root root 4096 2007-11-19 21:48 jre1.6.0_03

  lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root   21 2007-11-19 21:48 latest -> /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03

• By default Fedora will prefer IcedTea, so we need to correct that.

  Remove the current link to IcedTea first:
  
  $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --remove libjavaplugin.so \
    /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.7.0-icedtea/lib/i386/gcjwebplugin.so
  $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --remove java /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.7.0-icedtea/bin/java
  
  Create the new link to the Sun JRE
  
  $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/bin/java 18000
  $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so \
    libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 18000

• Check if we’ve used the correct settings and priority:

  $ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --display java | grep best
  
  Current `best' version is /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/bin/java.

• The browser plugin won’t work unless we install the correct compatibility libraries. This is because FC8 uses GCC 4.1, however JRE was compiled with an older version of GCC.

  $ sudo yum install compat-libstdc++-33 compat-libstdc++-29

• Make sure Firefox has the plugins loaded

  $ sudo /usr/bin/mozilla-plugin-config -i -f
  
  NOTE

  There is a bug in the Java plugin, the following work-around seems to work:

  $ cd /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/lib/i386/xawt/
  $ sudo cp libmawt.so libmawt.so.dist
  $ sudo sed -i 's/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g' libmawt.so

RAR

You just downloaded the newest release of your favorite tv show latest open source project only to discover its packaged using RAR files. Fedora can’t open RAR by default so we need to make that possible.

$ sudo yum install unrar

Media players

Depending on what you use as window manager (KDE, GNOME or XFCE), you’ll get a media player in which not all files you want to play function properly. This is all a matter of codecs. I personally prefer MPlayer as a Media Player, it has a great Firefox plugin as well. Using some excellent instructions, we can easily install Mplayer and additional codes.

$ sudo yum install mplayer mplayer-gui mplayer-skins mplayer-fonts mplayerplug-in mencoder

Again, lets make sure the Firefox plugin is loaded.

$ sudo /usr/bin/mozilla-plugin-config -i -f

To add additional codecs, follow these instructions:

$ cd ~
$ wget http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/all-20071007.tar.bz2

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/codecs
$ sudo tar -jxvf all-20071007.tar.bz2 --strip-components \
  1 -C /usr/lib/codecs/

That’s all for now, if I find any additional ‘generic’ items I change in my Fedora 8 installation I’ll post that as well.

Suggestions or comments are welcome!