fedora 17 .. todo list post install

So, a few days ago, I installed Fedora17, partly because I wanted a straight gnome-shell experience, and partly because I hadn't seriously tried a rpm based distro yet. The short of it is, that I'm really enjoying the standard gnome-shell environment - especially how customisable it is compared to Unity. So much so, that I think I'll be working off this linux partition for a while to come.

That said, Fedora did take significantly longer to get the everything installed than either Ubuntu or Mint does, mainly because it does not come standard with any non GPL'd software in it's default repository - but with a fair amount of googling, all was eventually sorted.

Now, only after all of the searching and tweaking, and more searching and installing was done, have I come across a good, comprehensive how-to that would have saved me loads of time if I had only stumbled on to it earlier.

Smashing Web's Fedora 17 Post Installation guide covers just about everything you would want to add to a fresh Fedora install. Here's a list (not complete) of the packages I've used from there:

Appearance and customisation:
yum install faenza-icon-theme
yum install gnome-tweak-toolyum install dconf-editor

installed some of the gnome-extensions listed there (will list these later.. possibly)

a better software installer:
yum install yumex

to enable the RPM Fusion repository just install (this allows you to get at some of the packages below)
yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

add the adobe repository for downloading Acrobat Reader, by running this at the terminal
## Adobe Repository 32-bit x86 ## rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux ## Adobe Repository 64-bit x86_64 ## rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

yum install flash-plugin nspluginwrapper alsa-plugins-pulseaudio libcurl

to play various Video formats:
yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly
yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs

dvd playback / ripping / players

yum install libdvdread libdvdnav lsdvd
rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm
yum install libdvdcss
yum install vlc
yum install mplayer mplayer-gui smplayer gnome-mplayer

and my music player of choice:
yum install clementine

BitTorrent client and IM client:
yum install transmission
yum install pidgin

Tools:
yum install nautilus-open-terminal
yum install p7zip p7zip-plugins
yum install filezilla

IDE's:
yum install netbeans (no longer in repo - see below)
yum install eclipse
yum install spe
yum install geany
yum install cssed
yum install anjuta

....
To run yum you need to be in a terminal with root privileges.
just type:
su -
at a terminal, then enter your root password, and then paste in the yum install commands and wait for the installs to finish.

I found two commands that would not work from the howto. One was "yum install netbeans" - its been removed from the repo because it is no longer GPL compliant. Instead follow the instructions to install it here: http://www.matthewhughes.co.uk/netbeans-on-fedora-17/
The other was "yum install gnochm" - instead use:
yum install chmsee