15 Things To Do After Installing Fedora

The preference for GNOME 3 and the non-requirement for KDE is the reason for primarily selecting the Xfce desktop when trying out new distros. Xfce is ideal when productivity is on top priority, however, not at the expense of functionality.

Here are 15 things you should do to get the best out of Fedora 20 post its installation -

1. Update Fedora – The first important thing to do would be to get the system updated and this requires no more than a single command mentioned below -
 

$ sudo yum update

The download size is going to be important based on the number of updates are present at the time of doing it.

2. Getting a better browser - Firefox + Chrome - Fedora 20 Xfce comes with the Midori. However, it’s quite bulky on high profile sites like youtube.com and crashes frequently. It would be great to get a heavy weight browser.

3. Installing Flash player - Adhering to the Fedora free software principles, there is no flash player. Firstly, you require setting up the yum repository for Adobe flash player, and then install the flash plugin package. The repository setup becomes a lot easier through an rpm provided by Adobe. You can setup the Adobe repository and download the rpm from the link here- http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

4. Selecting the Greybird theme and a splash screen - Fedora Xfce has the Adwaita theme when it boots initially, but since the Shimmer GreyBird theme is present in the theme list there is no reason to keep away from it. This is among the most professional and elegant looking gtk theme. Let’s take a look at the steps below -

Go to Settings > Appearance and select the Greybird theme.
Go to Settings > Window Manager : Style tab and select Greybird from the list of themes.
Setting a startup splash window
Go to Settings > Session and Startup : Splash tab and select "Simple" from the list. This will show a splash window with status when you load from login screen to desktop. Great to have an indicator.

Tweaking the mouse

Go to Settings > Mouse and Touchpad : Behavior tab and increase Double click time to somewhere around 760 ms. This will make it comfortable when maximize windows by double clicking their title area.

Removing the lower panel

It takes up a lot of space otherwise docks will not fit well into speed+efficiency oriented desktop environments like Xfce. Right click the panel and go to Panel > Panel Preferences, select Panel 2 and click the "-" button.

Giving the Terminal some transparency

The terminal application is known as "xfce4-terminal" supporting transparency. Open a terminal, click Edit > Preferences, go to Appearances tab and in the background section choose Transparent background and set Transparency to 0.70.

5. Optimising fonts and rendering - Here's how to get gorgeous looking fonts on Ubuntu Linux:

1. Create a file named .fonts.conf inside the home directory and fill it with the font configuration found here https://gist.github.com/silv3rm00n/5599072

2. Go to Settings > Appearances and set the font size to 9.
Reduce the font size of the Terminal to 10pt.

3. Download all varieties of Droid and Noto fonts from the Google Fonts store and save them to the directory "/usr/share/fonts/". That's how you install fonts on a linux system.

4. Go to "Applications > Settings > Appearance" : Fonts tab, and enable anti-aliasing with hinting level Medium and subpixel order of RGB.

5. Jump off and login back and your fonts should now have a better appearance.
Okay, the word better is much about perspective, but I could see a huge improvement on LCDs atleast as far as readability and looks are concerned.

6. Installing some extra tools – You can see below a bunch of command line tools that you can install for convenience.
$ sudo yum install htop wget lynx powertop dconf-editor lm_sensors

7. Installing the Gnome System Monitor- The default Xfce Task Manager enlists the processes quite well, however the gui is not that attractive like Gnome System Monitor. So you can get-
$ sudo yum install gnome-system-monitor
You can launch it from Application Menu > System > System Monitor.

8. Getting an Office suite and graphics app - There is not any office suite installed by default so it’s best to get LibreOffice.
$ sudo yum install libreoffice
You may want to install gimp as well for graphics work by using the command below -
$ sudo yum install gimp
9. Installing Skype - Hangouts are more preferred, however skype is useful at times at least for the time being. You can get skype from the following url. You can opt Fedora from the distro list and the rpm file will begin to download.
http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-computer/
You can also open this url and begin the download directly
http://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-linux/downloading/?type=fedora32
Or here is the direct link to the rpm file.
$ wget http://download.skype.com/linux/skype-4.2.0.11-fedora.i586.rpm

Install the rpm file with yum.
$ sudo yum install skype-4.2.0.11-fedora.i586.rpm

10. Speeding up system menus – You can make a file named .gtkrc-2.0 in your home directory and put in the following magical lines in it
gtk-menu-popup-delay = 0
gtk-menu-popdown-delay = 0
gtk-menu-bar-popup-delay = 0
gtk-enable-animations = 0
gtk-timeout-expand = 10
Saving the file, closing it, logout and login back. Now the system menus like the Application Menu on top left should be blazing fast.

11. Disconnecting mouse scroller from workspace- The mouse scroll on the desktop changes workspace and can be quite annoying if you are reading a webpage and scrolling up and down. It is best to switch it off and the reason to mention it here is, how hidden the place to configure it is.

Go to Settings > Window Manager Tweaks : Workspaces tab
Uncheck the option named "Use the mouse wheel on the desktop to switch workspaces".

12. Getting a better wallpaper- There is just one blue colored wallpaper which is quite plain. Distros including Mint and Elementary come with great wallpapers.

To extract the deb files use the ar and tar commands
$ ar -vx mint-backgrounds-petra_1.4_all.deb
This would make 3 files, namely debian-binary, control.tar.gz, data.tar.gz
The package contents are in the data.tar.gz file, so untar them.
$ tar -xzvf data.tar.gz
Now browse the directory and find the wallpapers.
Putting the wallpapers in the directory '/usr/share/backgrounds/xfce/'
Then selecting them from Desktop Settings on right click menu on the desktop.

13. Setting up rpmfusion repository- The fedora repositories do not have non-free or other proprietory software and you require third party repositories like rpmfusion to fully load your system. Nvidia graphics drivers, various multimedia codecs and players are available through rpmfusion. To view what else is there, go to Yum Extender and view the repository contents.

Run the following command to enable both free and non-free rpmfusion repositories in a single shot

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm'

 
It would install two packages named rpmfusion-free-release and rpmfusion-nonfree-release that setup the correct rpmfusion repositories for your fedora system.

14. Installing VLC player -
Vlc is a great cross platform media player that can play many video formats minus the need for installing codecs separately. It comes from the rpmfusion repositories we have already setup in the previous step.
$ sudo yum install vlcOnce installed you can see the launcher in Applications Menu > Multimedia

15. Installing Dropbox- You can download the correct Fedora rpm from the dropbox site...
https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=lnx
Install the rpm file using yum
$ sudo yum install nautilus-dropbox-1.6.0-1.fedora.x86_64.rpm
Once the installation is complete, you can launch it from Applications Menu > Internet > Dropbox and it will start to download the actual installation files. Once the installation is completed you can launch it and setup your account details to start syncing files.