Fedora

Fedora at Virginia Tech

Mirrors

Campus computing mirrors Fedora. Recent versions of Fedora can use the following pre-written files.

• /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
• /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo

Edit Hosts file

A hosts file[1] is an easy way to block a wide range of domains (ads, malware, etc). This works in Windows and Mac as well, but the file is in a different location. I found the MVPS hosts file[2] to be nice, but there are others available. You can also edit the file to add domains to block individually.

In Fedora, the hosts file is located in '/etc/hosts'. To edit or replace the file, you must be logged in as root. SELinux will not allow you to do this, so once you've moved your new hosts file, you have to restore the default security context.

su -
(your password here)
mv /home/(username)/hosts /etc/hosts
restorecon -v '/etc/hosts'

Wacom Driver

The Wacom driver "xorg-x11-drv-wacom" works well under Fedora. On a Fujitsu T4215, I have the pen functions working great, including all of the buttons. In case it isn't installed, here's the code to install it:

su -
yum install xorg-x11-drv-wacom

Restricted Repos

The restricted repos in Fedora have been more or less combined into one source called RPMFusion. There are versions for stable, testing, and rawhide. Below is the code to set up the stable versions of the free and non-free versions.

su -
rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

The only notable exception to the non-free repo is libdvdcss, which is available at www.videolan.org

VT Wireless

To get wireless configured, follow the NetworkManager instructions in the VT-Wireless article.

Annoying padding in Gnome

With the initial install, there's a lot of empty space between icons in the Gnome panels. While it's good for user interface design by increasing the amount of space around icons to prevent mistakes, it drives me nuts. Here's the code to restore it back to normal (no padding).

gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons true
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel/padding 0
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/panel/applets/systray/prefs/padding 0