Guidelines for a noob

[Mark Eggers]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:22:20 -0500, Aradenatorix Veckhom Vacelaevus wrote:

> Hi everybody:

> And this take us at my following doubt: There is a mirror or repository
> from where I can download upgrades, packages and all that stuff? Again
> with Ubuntu, inside my country I can choose two different repositories
> from where I can download almost everything, in fact one of them is
> inside my University :) so the upgrade is amazing fast.
> 
> Yesterday was boring to wait hours for the needed upgrade and for
> install few packages, perhaps a repository nearer will make this easier.

One yum plugin that might help with this is the following:

yum-plugin-fastestmirror.noarch

Just install that, and yum should go through and find the fastest 
repositories for you. The fastest repositories may change from time to 
time depending on load and network traffic.

> Finally my biggest problem now is how to use the YUM, I need you helping
> for install the flash plug-ins, the LibreOffice suite and that kind of
> things... of course I know I must start a new thread for each one, now
> simply I'm relating what I wanna do.

Instructions for getting and installing the Flash plugin can be found 
here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash

Basically, you get the repository information from Adobe, install it, 
then use yum to install the actual plugin.

In the directions from the above page, you might want to change

rpm -ivh 

to

yum install

This will keep yum from complaining that packages have been added outside 
of the yum mechanism.

For LibreOffice, there seem to be three paths:

1. You can remove OpenOffice, and enable rawhide for LibreOffice only. I
   don't know how the dependencies shake out though.

2. You can follow the instructions given here for example:

http://edigitales.org/installation-libreoffice-on-linux-fedora-14/

3. Or you can wait until Fedora 15, where LibreOffice will be the 
   default. See the following discussion for example.

http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?30,169738

The above is a thread from the fedora mailing list.

I've not tried methods 1 or 2, and will wait until Fedora 15 is released 
to move to LibreOffice.

In general, I use the command line for yum, with yum search, yum info, 
and then yum install. Many people are comfortable with the GUI available 
with PackageKit. I normally am running KDE, so I use KPackageKit to 
manage software when I use the GUI.

Welcome to Fedora . . . I hope you enjoy your stay.

. . . . just my two cents.

/mde/