The Perfect Desktop - Part 1: Fedora Core 6

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Last edited 02/17/2007

With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the first of a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Fedora Core 6 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the Fedora Core 6 desktop to have the following software installed:

Graphics:

• The GIMP - free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop
• F-Spot - full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop
• Google Picasa - application for organizing and editing digital photos

Internet:

• Firefox
• Opera
• Flash Player 9
• gFTP - multithreaded FTP client
• Thunderbird - email and news client
• Evolution - combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions
• aMule - P2P file sharing application
• Bittorrent client
• Azureus - Java Bittorrent client
• Gaim - multi-platform instant messaging client
• Skype
• Google Earth
• Xchat IRC - IRC client

Office:

• OpenOffice Writer - replacement for Microsoft Word
• OpenOffice Calc - replacement for Microsoft Excel
• Adobe Reader
• GnuCash - double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken
• Scribus - open source desktop publishing (DTP) application

Sound & Video:

• Amarok - audio player
• Audacity - free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor
• Banshee - audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods
• MPlayer - media player (video/audio), supports WMA
• Rhythmbox Music Player - audio player, similar to Apple's iTunes, with support for iPods
• gtkPod - software similar to Apple's iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini
• XMMS - audio player similar to Winamp
• dvd::rip - full featured DVD copy program
• Kino - free digital video editor
• Sound Juicer CD Extractor - CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs
• VLC Media Player - media player (video/audio)
• Real Player
• Totem - media player (video/audio)
• Xine - media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs
• GnomeBaker - CD/DVD burning program
• K3B - CD/DVD burning program
• Multimedia-Codecs

Programming:

• Nvu- WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Macromedia Dreamweaver, but not as feature-rich (yet)
• Bluefish - text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages
• Quanta Plus - web development environment, including a WYSIWYG editor

Other:

• VMware Server - lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don't have to entirely abandon Windows
• TrueType fonts
• Java

Fedora Core 6 lets you choose between multiple desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, XFCE). I've decided to install GNOME in this article.

I will use the username falko in this tutorial, and I will download all necessary files to falko's desktop which is equivalent to the directory /home/falko/Desktop. If you use another username (which you most probably do ;-)), please replace falko with your own username. So when I use a command like

cd /home/falko/Desktop

you must replace falko.

2 Installing The Base System

Download the five Fedora Core 6 iso images from http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/, burn them onto CDs, and boot your computer from the first CD. At the boot prompt, hit <ENTER>:

You can let the installer check your Fedora CDs, but if you're short on time select Skip as the tests can take some minutes:

Hit Next:

Select your language:

Select your keyboard layout:

Select Yes when asked Would you like to initialize this drive, erasing ALL DATA?:

The default partitioning is ok, so you can hit Next:

Confirm your selection by answering Yes to Are you sure you want to do this?:

The default networking settings (DHCP) are ok, so click on Next:

Select your time zone:

Specify a root password:

Now we select the software that we want to install. Select Office and Productivity only. Don't enable additional repositories as we will do this later (in my tests the installer crashed three times when I selected Fedora Extras; a fourth time it was ok). Then check Customize now and click on Next:

Now we can select the package groups we want to install. Select

• GNOME Desktop Environment
• Authoring and Publishing
• Editors
• Educational Software
• Engineering and Scientific
• Games and Entertainment
• Graphical Internet
• Graphics
• Office/Productivity
• Sound and Video
• Text-based Internet
• Development Libraries
• Development Tools
• Administration Tools
• Base
• Dial-up Networking Support
• Java
• System Tools
• X Window System

and uncheck all other groups, then click on Next:

The installer checks and resolves all dependencies: