More on FC6

Ok, I am finally in the mood of posting some more info on my experience with fedora core 6.

First of all I would like tell one more time that I feel very impressed with new visual effects provided my Compiz. I have seen the 3d desktop effects before, but here it is much faster (almost no impacts on CPU) and there more effects with windows and others.

I have found a very nice post which shows how to set up nvidia drivers, install some missing parts of software so you can play mp3 files and more. In addition to this post, I would like to note that the described way of installing nvidia drivers didn\’t work for me. There was a strange thing with pre-requisite of kernel RPM. It was trying to install the same version of kernel I already had and thus yum was giving me errors. What I did is I manually installed the package needed providing the –replace-files and –replacepkgs arguments to rpm command. After that the kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drivers-nvidia were installed successfully. Another note here is that apart of setting up additional options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as described in the provided post I had to add a missing modes option to show which video resolutions are to be used.

Another thing I noticed is that compiz doesn\’t work with KDE by default (provided you install KDE). There is a workaround though: create a bin directory in your home, create a shell script (something like compiz-kde.sh) with the next content:

#!/bin/bash

compiz –replace gconf decoration transset wobbly fade minimize cube rotate &

gnome-window-decorator &

don\’t forget to chmod +x the file. Then create a desktop shortcut to this script move the shortcut to ~/.kde/Autostart directory.

Basically, this will do the following: when KDE starts, it will run the script as autostart. The script will run compiz and tell it to replace the current VM. Then the script will run the gnome-window-decorator since the native KDE windows decorations are not supported. The only problem here is that KDE desktop pager doesn\’t work properly.

Another thing is that if you don\’t like the standard keyboard shortcuts used with compiz, you can change them with gconf-editor (First you need to get gconf-editor by running yum install gconf-editor). Open the gconf-editor and go to apps->compiz->plugins. Then just select a plugin you are interested to change keys for and do the needed changes :)

Finally, you might have problems with flash plugin for firefox. The problem is that flash graphics is displayed, but all text is missing. For this, you need to apply actions described at Macromedia FAQ #11 as follows:

mkdir -p /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/
ln -s /etc/X11/fs/config /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config

After that, just restart the firefox :)

If you have a laptop with Intel Wireless card (like mine – HP nx6110), then you need to do the same operations you did in FC5 – update the firmware by installing the ipw2200-firmware package (yum install ipw2200-firmware).
I think that this is it for the moment. If you have any questions and want some more info – just let me know :)