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NOTE: This is not an official form of support. This is not an official service of Red Hat. These things may solve your worst nightmare, or they may eat all of the cheese in your house. I make no guarantees. YMMV.
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Now, I'll give you a summary:
Fedora is a Linux distribution from Red Hat that doesn't cost any money, includes only open-source software, and always includes the latest versions of software.
Fedora is a community-supported project. That means that you can be involved in creating Fedora, if you want.
A new version of Fedora comes out every six months or so. When a new version comes out, the previous version becomes unsupported about a year later. This means re-installing your OS every 6 - 8 months (currently upgrades between Fedora versions don't go so well).
The advantage of using Fedora is that you're always on the cutting edge of Linux development, more so than any other major distro, while still having a stable operating system.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based on Fedora, so if you want to learn a little about RHEL for free, use Fedora. RHEL6 was based on Fedora 13.
Also, you can (sometimes) actually call Red Hat and get support for RHEL, which you will never be able to do for Fedora.
Fedora is distributed for free, and RHEL costs money.
Fedora is much more cutting-edge than RHEL is, and Fedora has a larger community of users willing to help out and give free support (like this web page).
Red Hat also has a cool page that answers this question.
You can see a list of all the Fedora 14 packages in the Fedora Package Database.
(Thanks to Tom Van Vleck for suggesting this question.)
There are many versions:
The "Live Media" is a LiveCD--you can just put the CD into your computer and start the OS without installing it. You can also use the LiveCD to install a very basic version of Fedora, if you want.
The "Install Media" contains all the Fedora packages, and you can install from that without having an Internet connection.
Then there's the choice between i686 and x86_64. Here's how to figure out which one you need:
For more details on how to get Fedora, including how to buy a CD (if you can't download one), see the Distribution page on the Fedora Project site.
ReiserFS and JFS are not officially supported by the Fedora Project. (That means that you can use them, but you won't find a lot of official help from the Fedora Project if things go wrong.)
At the installer prompt, type this for ReiserFS:
linux selinux=0 reiserfs
or this for JFS:
linux selinux=0 jfs
NOTE: You cannot use SELinux on ReiserFS or JFS. (If you don't know what SELinux is, you can ignore this warning.)
(Thanks to whiprush [quoting Jesse Keating] for this. Thanks to Kai Thomsen for catching an important typo.
You can also run the normal 32-bit version of Fedora on your 64-bit computer, although that's rarely required nowadays.
If you have a Core Duo Intel Mac, you want the i686 version of Fedora. If you have a Core 2 Duo or later Intel Mac, you want the x86_64 version of Fedora. (See the question about getting Fedora.) Note that some things may not yet work perfectly on Intel Macs. mactel-linux.org is a good site for information about running Fedora (or any Linux) on a Mactel machine.
If you have a G3, G4, or G5 Mac, there is no longer an installation disc available for your machine for Fedora 13.
Otherwise, to search for software packages, you can use rpm.pbone.net.
Many of the packages I mention in the FAQ are only available from rpmfusion. To configure your system so that you can install packages from rpmfusion, follow these instructions:
su -
yum --nogpgcheck install http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
If you have graphical access to your desktop, you can use the graphical tools to install software. Go to the System menu, choose "Administration", and then click on "Add/Remove Software".
Fedora will automatically let you know when updates are available for your software.
Often people want to use install or update software using the command line. For this you use a program called "yum". First become root, and then you can use the following commands:
yum list available
yum install packagename
yum update packagename
If you leave out "packagename" yum will update all your software.
yum check-update
yum search word
For more info about yum, see the yum project page. (Thanks to Ron Kuris for this tip.)
To install an RPM file that you downloaded outside of yum, open up a terminal, and as root do:
rpm -Uvh filename.rpm
If you have Internet access, you can also install local files by doing:
yum --nogpgcheck install filename.rpm
Which is handy because it will automatically download and install any dependencies that that RPM has.
There is a piece of software like this for Fedora, that comes in the standard Fedora installation. It's called yum. It can automatically download and install a program and all of its dependencies, with just one command. I even provide a special configuration that I use for yum on my computer, in the question where I explain how to use yum.
su -
yum --nogpgcheck install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum install --exclude=AdobeReader* flash-plugin nspluginwrapper.{i686,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libcurl.i686
mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v
su -
yum install totem-mozplugin gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad
Now, you can see movies on web sites!
Note that if you have also installed mozplugger from the PDF question, you might get a pop-up movie player instead of having the movie embedded in the page.
To start Empathy, click on the Applications menu, go to "Internet," and choose "Empathy IM Client."
If you don't like Empathy, you can use Pidgin, another Instant Messenger program for Linux. To install Pidgin:
Pidgin will then be available in the Applications menu, under "Internet", as "Pidgin Instant Messenger".
i686
or x86_64
package, depending on whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit machine.)su -
yum install rpm-build cabextract ttmkfdir wget
wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
yum install --nogpgcheck /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
(Thanks to David A. Wheeler and others for convincing me to add the MS Core Fonts instructions. Thanks to byro for pointing out the URL to the 2.0 package!)
su -
yum list akmod-\* \*-drv\* kmod-\* dkms-\*
If you don't find what you need this way, try Googling for:
Fedora NameOfHardware
or:
Linux NameOfHardware
Where NameOfHardware is the normal name of your hardware. If it has more than one name, keep trying different ones until you get a result.
Now you can read and write to your NTFS drives!
For information on how to use your NTFS drive, you can read the NTFS FAQ. (You don't need to worry about /proc/filesystems like it says there, though.)
su -
yum install libdvdread libdvdcss libdvdnav gstreamer-plugins-ugly gstreamer-plugins-bad
And now you can play DVDs! You can find Totem in the "Applications" menu, under "Sound and Video." It's just called "Movie Player." Sometimes it will say that it can't play a DVD, but it will usually work if you close Totem, then insert the DVD into your drive, then wait for a popup to ask you what you want to do, and then click "Open."
Here's how to install the correct MP3 plugin:
su -
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
yum install audacious-plugins-freeworld-mp3
Now you should be able to play MP3s in your favorite Fedora MP3 player!
NOTE: For home users in any country (even the USA), there is no legal problem with MP3 players, so you are not doing anything illegal by enabling MP3 support in Fedora. However, if you are in the USA and you want to encode MP3s or use them in a commercial setting, you may be required to pay patent royalties.
If you'd like to resolve it, do the following command to get the correct key for the site you're downloading from:
You must be root to do any of this.
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY*
rpm --import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
rpm --import http://freshrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-freshrpms
rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm --import http://atrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
rpm --import http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/gpg-pubkey-newrpms.txt
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/dries/RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt
rpm --import http://www.jpackage.org/jpackage.asc
rpm --import http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/gpg-pubkey-ff6382fa-3e1ab2ca
rpm --import http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/RPM-GPG-KEY.planetccrma.txt
NOTE: If you install my yum configuration, most of these keys are installed for you automatically.
(Thanks to Kai Thomsen for the original location of the ATrpms key, and thanks to Tom Householder for the new location! Thanks to Pim Rupert for the location of the Dries key. Thanks to Anduin Withers for a good idea about how to reorganize this question. Thanks to Dieter Komendera for the new location of the FreshRPMs key.)
NOTE: If you have nVidia drivers installed, you must un-install them before installing these ATI drivers.
Here's how to install them:
su -
yum install kmod-catalyst
init 3
catalyst-config-display enable
new-kernel-pkg --kernel-args=nomodeset --mkinitrd --dracut --update $(rpm -q --queryformat="%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" kernel | tail -n 1)
reboot
If you have any trouble with the RPM Fusion RPMs, please report a bug to the RPM Fusion Bugzilla.
su -
yum install kmod-nvidia
new-kernel-pkg --mkinitrd --dracut --update $(rpm -q --queryformat="%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}\n" kernel | tail -n 1)
reboot
And now you should have working 3D with your nVidia card!
Note that if you have an older card, you may need to install kmod-nvidia-173xx or kmod-nvidia-96xx. There is a list on the nVidia site that says which cards are supported by which driver.
If you need support for the nVidia drivers, check out the nV News "NVIDIA Linux Forum". (Thanks to Exile in Paradise for this tip.)
linux mediacheck ide=nodma
Note that sometimes mediacheck will report that only some CDs are bad, but this will still fix that problem. (Thanks to Tony Nelson for reminding me of that!)
Also, the Fedora Project provides a detailed installation guide if you'd like any other help while installing.
In particular, you might want to try using the special boot options listed in the Install Guide. Of those, the most-frequently useful are: noapic, acpi=off, and xdriver=vesa.
If any of those commands fixes your problem, please file a bug in Red Hat's Bugzilla.
mount -t cifs //1.2.3.4/share /mnt/somedirectory
For more information about this, in a terminal you can do:
man mount.cifs
Note that CIFS can't resolve Windows computer names, so you're better off using their IP addresses.
(But as a side note, if you actually want to contribute something useful, there's a whole page about that!)