NoisyGecko

These are notes about a recent Fedora Core 6 install I performed. The system had a ASUS P4P800 motherboard.

Initial Install

Need to boot with the following for some systems just to
be able to install:

   linux irqpoll

This seems to be the norm with all the computers around our office.

Installation hanged twice in "verifying packages" or something like that, so I finally just installed the basic system with development setup. That worked.

After install I updated it with the package manager. Eventually I figured out I needed to add the irqpoll thing to my grub.conf

Setup sudo:

    su
   chmod +w /etc/sudoers
   gedit /etc/sudoers
   # Add line: myuserid    ALL=(ALL)     ALL
   chmod -w /etc/sudoers

Install extra software by running the following:

   sudu yum -y install tsclient rdesktop
   sudu yum -y install xemacs

Update to Firefox 2.0

By default you get Firefox 1.5 on Fedora Core 6 (Yeah, seems pretty lame to me), and here is how you can get that updated pretty easily to Firefox 2.0:

sudo yum -y -t --enable=development update firefox

That enables the "development" repository and then installs Firefox from there.
Found that tip at http://www.philoking.com/2006/11/15/how-to-update-to-firefox-20-on-fedora-core-6-the-easy-way/

Install RealPlayer 10 Media Player

(Stolen from http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/fc6-tips.php#rplayer with modifications.)

Before you install the play you'll need to make sure the compat-libstdc++-33 and the alsa-oss modules are installed:

# yum -y install compat-libstdc++-33 alsa-oss

Download the RealPlayer10 package from the following location:

RealPlayer10GOLD.rpm

Then install the RPM:

# rpm -ihv RealPlayer10GOLD.rpm

The other thing you'll need to do is prevent the mplayerplug-in you installed above from trying to handle Real Media. I don't know why it's included because it almost never works correctly. Also, the totem-complex-plugin will try to play if the mplayer one isn't there. The easiest way to disable it is to remove the appropriate plugin files:

# cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
# rm mplayerplug-in-rm.so
# rm libtotem-complex-plugin.so

Then whenever you want to view something just use /usr/bin/realplay . Here is a link to a cute test video to make sure it's working for you.

If audio is working but you have a black screen then it's possible your video card doesn't support XVideo. You can turn it off by clicking on Tools -> Preferences then choose the Hardware tab and disable Use XVideo .

If the video doesn't play properly the first thing to check is to make sure you're not running SElinux, it seems to prevent the RealPlayer from getting access to the drivers. I currently run with SElinux disabled but I recommend you run it in the Targeted mode rather than the most secure mode.

Now a bit of a tricky part. You'll need to edit the executable /usr/bin/realplay as root and locate the section below around line 56. Then add the code that's highlighted and save the file back.

 .
 .
  export HELIX_LIBS
fi

LD_PRELOAD="$LDPRELOAD:/usr/lib/libaoss.so.0.0.0"
export LD_PRELOAD
 
# See if LD_PRELOAD contains any of the sound server libs. If so, remove them.
LD_PRELOAD=`echo $LD_PRELOAD | sed -e 's/\([^:]*libesd[^:]*\|[^:]*libarts[^:]*\):\?//g'`
 .
 .

After you've run it the first time and gone through the configuration screens edit the ~/.realplayerrc file and add the following line in the [helix] section of the configuration:

[helix]
SoundDriver=2
      .
      .

For some reason on some systems RealPlayer uses the the old and virtually obsolete OSS sound driver. The line above tells it to use the newer ALSA sound driver instead.

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