FC5: Things to Do after Installing Red Hat Fedora Core 5 (FC5)

For FC5, I installed a lot of extras from the installation-DVD, so much of the work in customizing FC4 (described in §6.10 below) was not needed after the install. However, below are the things I did need to install afterwards.

• yum install gv [see remarks under FC4]
• yum install lyx [I use it to quickly look up symbol names for L^ATEX]
• yum install octave-forge [ditto]
• Change default paper size in GNOME from A4 to Letter (sigh)
  In a shell, type printconf-gui, select printer, click Edit, select "Driver Options", change "Page Size" to Letter, click OK, click Apply. Repeat for each printer. Chasing this down cost me a couple of hours and a lot of wasted paper.
• ln -s /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/perl [my scripts want it here]

• yum install perl-libwww-perl
• perl -MCPAN -e shell
  get Bundle::CPAN
  get [lots of things related to Web programming]

• Getting LaTeX2HTML Working
  • yum install latex2html
  • Install various bugfixes for latex2html (see §9 for details)

• Download and install the fluendo-mp3 decoder (you ``purchase'' it for $0)
• yum install gtk+-devel [for gtk-config, which was needed by the software-MIDI-keyboard clavinet (a source tarball) and also by Faust-generated gtk UIs.]
• yum install qt-devel [for qdu, as I recall]
• Install tarball for qdu [disk-space usage analyzer/manager]
  (requires qmake from qt-devel)
  To get qdu to compile, I had to comment out ``#include "directoryview.h"'' in qduInterface.cpp.
• Install LaTeX utility powerdot for overhead presentations
  • Installed fourier (fonts used by powerdot - search for fourier-GUT.tar.gz)
  • Upgraded xkeyval before powerdot would compile - FC5 version not quite new enough -- get xkeyval.zip: wget ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/xkeyval.zip
  • A viable alternative to powerdot is beamer.cls, which is already distributed with tetex in FC5. If I'd known about beamer, I would have tried it first, since getting powerdot going requires a number of non-rpm installs. However, beamer does not use pstricks (in fact I read it is incompatible with it), and I'm already addicted to using pstricks to easily customize the slide background. I'm therefore hooked on powerdot already. The new FC5 user should probably try beamer first.
  • Created (from the README file) a Makefile for installing xkeyval on FC5. (cd to the top-level xkeyval directory and type make.) These changes will be whacked on the next FC5 update of tetex. You can try changing TEXROOT to /usr/local/share/texmf, but I like to give the official distribution a chance each update. After all, it should give us the latext xkeyval!
• Install tarball for Adobe Acrobat Reader (RPM not in Fedora extras).
• Install tarball for pine [for email processing in a shell window]
  The build command that worked was build SSLDIR=/usr/bin lrh
• Install Planet CCRMA [follow directions to set up repositories]
  • yum install planetccrma-core [kernel, sound drivers, and such]
  • yum install audacity [sound editor]
  • yum install qjackctl [jack control interface]
  • yum install jackmix [jack-based mixer]
  • yum install jack-rack [LADSPAA effects rack]
  • yum install snd-gtk [Bill Schottstaedt's sound editor]
• yum install tcl-devel [for pd]
• Install tarball for pd extended

• Install RPM for RealPlayer

The most annoying glitch in my FC5 installation was that I could not figure out how to mount my old FC4 system disk, because it was in ``LVM'' format and not already known to the FC5 system. I later learned that I should have ``exported'' it so it then could be ``imported'' on the new system. However, since I wanted to be able to boot my old FC4 system in the event something was amiss in FC5, I would not have wanted to try exporting the main FC4 system disk anyway. I ended up copying in my personal data from another (older) backup disk. Since I'm not using RAID, I plan to use ext3 file systems for future Fedora systems.⁸