Fedora Core 7

Upgrading from previous Fedora
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# rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm
Fedora 7 comes with a much improved font package which does NOT get installed when you upgrade for some reason. You'll first want to remove any of the Microsoft fonts first if you had installed them previously then install the new Red Hat provided fonts:
# rpm -ev msttcorefonts
# yum -y install liberation-fonts
# service xfs restart
And finally you're going to need to do an update of the whole system. This will most likely pick up official Fedora updates as well as updated packages from the Livna repository. This might take a while.
# yum -y update

Install MP3 Plug-in
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Since you've been following along this next step is about as easy as it gets. Just use yum to automatically install the MP3 plug-ins for xmms and Rhythmbox like this:
# yum -y install xmms xmms-mp3 xmms-faad2 gstreamer-plugins-ugly \
gstreamer-plugins-bad libmad libid3tag
While you're here you might as well install music player
Banshee:
# yum -y install banshee
The -y flag is to automatically answer yes to any question. If you want to be able to say no you can ignore that flag.
While you're there I highly recommend the grip CD ripper which supports both MP3 and Ogg formats. Once again installation is quite simple:
# yum -y install grip

Other Handy Utilities
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Here are a few other tools that aren't installed by default but a lot of people find handy:
# yum -y install gnomebaker testdisk thunderbird \
screen cups-pdf filelight unrar boost
boost - Advanced graphical Bittorrent
clientcups-pdf - Add-on to CUPS which creates a PDF Printer which you can use to print any document in PDF format. The file is written to your Desktop.
filelight - A wonderful graphical viewer of where your disk space usage is. Very handy for cleaning up your home directory.
gnomebaker - GTK based CD/DVD burning utilityscreen - If you do a lot with the command line you'll find screen
invaluabletestdisk - Two command line utilities to recover lost partitions and undelete files on FAT filesystems. VERY handy for undeleting files on flash memory cards.
thunderbird - Excellent E-mail client that complements Firefox
unrar - Useful utility to extract RAR archives

Install Java J2RE and Mozilla Plug-in
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It's also very handy to have the Java run-time environment available and most importantly a Mozilla plug-in so you can view dynamic content. It's unfortunate that Mozilla will actually crash if you go to a site containing Java and you don't have the plug-in installed. The libraries in Fedora 7 are newer than the ones used by Sun's build so you'll also need to install a compatability library.
Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 2 from Java.com. You'll want to grab the Linux RPM in self-extracting file. Then you want to install it with:
# yum -y install compat-libstdc++-33
# sh ./jre-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin
Then you'll probably want to enable Java Plug-ins and here once again there is no easy way:
# ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_02/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
And finally you'll need to tell Fedora that you wish to use this version of Java as the preferred interpreter rather than the Open Source version that's installed by default. You'll of course need to adjust the full pathname if you install a newer version of the jre than the one in this example: # /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java \
/usr/java/jre1.6.0_02/bin/java 1602
# /usr/sbin/alternatives --config java
There are 2 programs which provide 'java'.
Selection Command
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+ 1 /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.5.0-gcj/bin/java
* 2 /usr/java/jre1.6.0_02/bin/java
Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number: 2
# java -version
java version "1.6.0_02"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_02-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_02-b05, mixed mode, sharing)
If you know of an easier way please post it to the Comments section below.
After you re-start your browser you can test the Java plug-in installation at http://java.com/en/download/installed.jsp