Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[shikitohno]

Well, here is a pretty decent guide for some basic setup that you probably wouldn't know how to do on your on sgreger. I gave it a quick glance and all seems correct with it, but this will get sudo work for you, install "restricted" codecs and media format support (ie, you can read mp3s and DVDs on it), and get you java and flash. For java, you can just follow his steps to install the OpenJDK, unless you're doing some sort of Java work that absolutely requires the Oracle package. For music players, I was partial to quodlibet, though I now run mpd with ncmpcpp. MPD is potentially a lot more configuration, but the default /etc/mpd.conf will probably work well enough for you, as long as you change the location of your library. It does require you be quite a bit more organized about your music than many people are though, as it'll only check one directory for music. So if you tell it to look in ~/Music, it'll check all the subdirectories of that folder, but you won't be able to add some other directory outside of it. You can get it to look elsewhere with soft links though. Also, "sudo yum install ntfs-3g" will let you read and write from your windows partition while you're in Linux. So if you want to look at pictures or something on the windows partitions, you don't need to reboot. Also, the video drivers section should work for you if you've got an Nvidia card. If you have an ATI card, it'll be similar, but slightly different. Nvidia's proprietary drivers will almost certainly provide some extra bang for your buck in terms of graphics card performance over the nouveau drivers on so new a card.

Finally, as an alternative to Gnome3, I quite liked WindowMaker. It was a dead project for a while, but according to the Arch mailing lists, they've just started updating it again, and it worked pretty well for me. WindowMaker allowed you to minimize/maximize anything by right clicking on the title bar of that program. And changing from Gnome3 to e17 of WindowMaker or something is pretty easy. I can try and come up with a list of any particularly useful programs I like, if you need something. Keep me posted on how things go and if you need any help. Also, lol at liking Ubuntu better. You never even really got to use it or deal with it.

It's like saying you like a car because you drove a go cart once that was modelled after it. LiveCD and the actual experience are miles apart. The liveCD environment is great for seeing if certain major things like the UI are to your taste, but you need to get it installed and see if the fine details are to your liking as well.

[sgreger1]

Well, here is a pretty decent guide for some basic setup that you probably wouldn't know how to do on your on sgreger. I gave it a quick glance and all seems correct with it, but this will get sudo work for you, install "restricted" codecs and media format support (ie, you can read mp3s and DVDs on it), and get you java and flash. For java, you can just follow his steps to install the OpenJDK, unless you're doing some sort of Java work that absolutely requires the Oracle package. For music players, I was partial to quodlibet, though I now run mpd with ncmpcpp. MPD is potentially a lot more configuration, but the default /etc/mpd.conf will probably work well enough for you, as long as you change the location of your library. It does require you be quite a bit more organized about your music than many people are though, as it'll only check one directory for music. So if you tell it to look in ~/Music, it'll check all the subdirectories of that folder, but you won't be able to add some other directory outside of it. You can get it to look elsewhere with soft links though. Also, "sudo yum install ntfs-3g" will let you read and write from your windows partition while you're in Linux. So if you want to look at pictures or something on the windows partitions, you don't need to reboot. Also, the video drivers section should work for you if you've got an Nvidia card. If you have an ATI card, it'll be similar, but slightly different. Nvidia's proprietary drivers will almost certainly provide some extra bang for your buck in terms of graphics card performance over the nouveau drivers on so new a card.

Finally, as an alternative to Gnome3, I quite liked WindowMaker. It was a dead project for a while, but according to the Arch mailing lists, they've just started updating it again, and it worked pretty well for me. WindowMaker allowed you to minimize/maximize anything by right clicking on the title bar of that program. And changing from Gnome3 to e17 of WindowMaker or something is pretty easy. I can try and come up with a list of any particularly useful programs I like, if you need something. Keep me posted on how things go and if you need any help. Also, lol at liking Ubuntu better. You never even really got to use it or deal with it.

It's like saying you like a car because you drove a go cart once that was modelled after it. LiveCD and the actual experience are miles apart. The liveCD environment is great for seeing if certain major things like the UI are to your taste, but you need to get it installed and see if the fine details are to your liking as well.

Yah I was actuallyjus tin the process of doing that tutorial but am kind of confused after the first step.

So they guy has me installing yum by entering this:

yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/...ble.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfr...ble.noarch.rpm

It looked like it was installing for a while, then in my terminal windows it looked like people were having a conversation like in achat room or something, then it looked like it was just listing the contents of a webpage. Then it spent 10 minutes saying bash command could not be found (with a random conversation between two people stitched into all of it) and then finally says "Follow me on faceboook, twitterm goo+" etc etc.

Is this normal?



Edit; Okay I closed the terminal, killed the proces and tried again. It seems to have worked this time.

[shikitohno]

Yeah, though wouldn't have worked. And you weren't installing yum, that's the process to install the RPMfusion repository of packages. Yum checks repositories for pre-compiled binaries when you do a 'yum search foo' and you need to have the appropriate repos installed in order for a package to show up. RPMFusion and Google will likely be the only non-standard repos you'll need. Also, although it will install, if you're looking for something like LibreOffice, they have rpms you could install from on their site, but it's best to install from yum instead. So unless you have a really good reason to install from an RPM (99% of times you don't), use the yum instead so that it'll keep track of everything nicely for you. Also, in the terminal, ctrl+c will kill the currently running process if it can, for future reference.

[sgreger1]

Do you have any comment on autoplus or easylife? It is supposed to make it easier to install all of the necessry things. Is this necessarery or will following the tutorial you linked to handle most of the basic stuff I will require (codecs etc).


Also, is there any keyboard shortcut to paste into the Terminal window? I have been doing it by right clicking but I wish I could CTRL+V like on windows, I am sure there is ashortcut somewhere.


This filesystem is kind of confusing, it tells me to go to "Add the following to a file called google.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/

But i went into that folder the there was no file called google.repo there.


It also appears (based on this tutorial) that my ATI graphics card is not supported, but rather only Nvidia ones are

* Installing ATi driver

Please note that Gnome Shell doesn't work with fglrx.

[shikitohno]

That tutorial will take care of all the basic stuff. I've never seen the need to bother with something like autoplus. For pasting, click on the terminal window so that you know it's active, and press the middle mouse button/scroll wheel if you have one. If not, shift+insert will work. the insert key will be around your print screen key and stuff. As the /etc/yum.repos.d/ that's probably just bad writing on his part. There won't be a google.repo file there by default. He meant make the file first, and put that in there. You can make the file by type sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo. Also at some point you make want to try playing around with vi/vim for a CLI text editor. It can be more powerful than nano, and vi is helpful to know because prety much no matter what linux distro you use in the future, some form of vi or vim will be included by default. For vim, press 'i' to enter insert mode, type what you want, and hit escape to exit insert mode. Navigation is done with hjkl, and you can exit a file after you're out of insert mode by type :q. To save what you changed and exit, type :wq. For now, nano will suffice to get you up and running quickly, but installing vim can let you play around with it a little bit later on.

Oh, also, install screen. Screen is an amazing program. With screen, you can run any number of terminal program in one window/tab, rather than having to have a separate tab or window open for each.

[sgreger1]

That tutorial will take care of all the basic stuff. I've never seen the need to bother with something like autoplus. For pasting, click on the terminal window so that you know it's active, and press the middle mouse button/scroll wheel if you have one. If not, shift+insert will work. the insert key will be around your print screen key and stuff. As the /etc/yum.repos.d/ that's probably just bad writing on his part. There won't be a google.repo file there by default. He meant make the file first, and put that in there. You can make the file by type sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo. Also at some point you make want to try playing around with vi/vim for a CLI text editor. It can be more powerful than nano, and vi is helpful to know because prety much no matter what linux distro you use in the future, some form of vi or vim will be included by default. For vim, press 'i' to enter insert mode, type what you want, and hit escape to exit insert mode. Navigation is done with hjkl, and you can exit a file after you're out of insert mode by type :q. To save what you changed and exit, type :wq. For now, nano will suffice to get you up and running quickly, but installing vim can let you play around with it a little bit later on.

Oh, also, install screen. Screen is an amazing program. With screen, you can run any number of terminal program in one window/tab, rather than having to have a separate tab or window open for each.

Yah I figured I had to make the file but it said I didn't have privaledges. It then dawned on me that I would have to create it from within the terminal but I don't know the required code to create a new file in that folder. I will try again now.


Also, is there any way to change the color scheme? For example I want the terminal window to be grey with white letteringinstead of white with black lettering. In the system settings I see the option to change the background but not the color scheme. Is this something that needs to be done in the terminal?

[shikitohno]

I don't know about with gnome-terminal, but if you install sakura, there's a config file in ~/.config/sakura/sakura.conf. You can edit that by opening it with nano ~/.config/sakura/sakura.conf. If you install urxvt (yum install rxvt-unicode), you can change the settings via a file called ~/.Xresources. If you feel like being particularly lazy, you can just steal my config from here.

You can just take the the .Xresources file and put it in your home directory, or you can clone it all with git and have all my config files in a directory called Config, and move .Xresources elsewhere. If you use that, after you put .Xresources in your home folder and you've installed rxvt-unicode, run xrdb -merge .Xresources, and you'll be using my config. You'll want to change line five from /home/Shiki/urxvt-to-uzbl to just 'firefox'. This page will give you examples of some of the other things you can customize, and you'll just have to look of the hex values for the colours you want. At the moment, it's set to be transparent. You can make new tabs in urxvt by pressing ctrl+shift+↓, close tabs with ctrl+d.

[sgreger1]

Okay so I managed to brick it already

I installed Compiz Fusion simple-CSSM, went to open it and the screen scrambled. Now Whenever I start my computer it just says "Oh no, something has gone wrong, contact a sys admin".

God damnit.

[GoVegan]

Okay so I managed to brick it already

I installed Compiz Fusion simple-CSSM, went to open it and the screen scrambled. Now Whenever I start my computer it just says "Oh no, something has gone wrong, contact a sys admin".

God damnit.

http://www.geeksquad.com/

[sgreger1]

http://www.geeksquad.com/

I wouldn't trust geeksquad to fix my blender, let alone anything Linux related lol. But I may have to if I can't figure out how to do it. I havn't tried loading it in safe mode yet because if I did I wouldn't know where to begin looking or what may be causing the problems. I thought maybe it was a graphics card issue since I had the weird thing happen with my screen but I did install the ATI drivers successfully so don't know what else to do.

[GoVegan]

I used to use a dual boot system years ago. There were several chat rooms on IRC with Linux nuts and I could usually go there for help. I don't remember any rooms in particular but they are not hard to find. I ended up taking the approach that if I needed a manual to do a simple task, I won't use it. It is fun to play around with though. Maybe I will convert my current computer when I get a new one.

[lxskllr]

get to a command prompt and try

mutter --replace

[sgreger1]

get to a command prompt and try

mutter --replace

How do I get to a command prompt? It won't even load Fedora. And what does mutter --replace do? I will try going in recovery mode and testing it out but what should I be looking for after I enter this command?

[shikitohno]

Well, since it happened immediately after you install and ran compiz, I'd say try going into single-user mode or rescue mode, whatever they're calling it, and removing compiz. You can run 'rpm -qa | grep compiz' to see what compiz packages you have. Remove them with yum erase packagename. Also, in single user mode you'll have root privileges by default, so you don't need to use sudo. You'll be in a text only environment, and you can scroll by either using pgup/pgdn or shift+ those two, I forget which. Before you hit y to confirm the removal, make sure to look at what it says will get removed. If it tries to remove gnome or something else that you need, make sure to reinstall it before rebooting, thought it really shouldn't. After that runs, try rebooting and see if it's resolved. If you can boot, then compiz is just going to be a no-go for you for the time being.

Also, you may want to edit your post on fedora forums to reflect that it's simple CCSM. Really shouldn't have screwed things up the way you described, though. Who knows. Also, grab another computer if you can, fire up IRC, and connect to irc.freenode.net Register your nick (you'll need to register it to get into the channel), and join #fedora. That's the official fedora support channel. They'll help you out, although I warn you that if they link you to instructions and you say it's too technical and looks like Arabic, they may not be too keen on expending further efforts helping you. Those guys are generally pretty knowledgeable, though, and they've helped me out a fair number of times in the past.

[sgreger1]

Well, since it happened immediately after you install and ran compiz, I'd say try going into single-user mode or rescue mode, whatever they're calling it, and removing compiz. You can run 'rpm -qa | grep compiz' to see what compiz packages you have. Remove them with yum erase packagename. Also, in single user mode you'll have root privileges by default, so you don't need to use sudo. You'll be in a text only environment, and you can scroll by either using pgup/pgdn or shift+ those two, I forget which. Before you hit y to confirm the removal, make sure to look at what it says will get removed. If it tries to remove gnome or something else that you need, make sure to reinstall it before rebooting, thought it really shouldn't. After that runs, try rebooting and see if it's resolved. If you can boot, then compiz is just going to be a no-go for you for the time being.

Okay so after itlists the packages I do

yum erase package1
yum erase package2
yum erase package3

etc? Or literally type packagname?