Umar Ahmad

Things to do after installing Fedora

Getting the right packages after a fresh install is a headache. That is exactly what I had when I had to do a fresh installation of my Fedora after I accidentally corrupted my entire disk :frowning:.

I didn’t want to spend days installing the packages this time. This time I wanted to do it smart and quick.

The problem here was that I couldn’t just yum install everything, that’s because Fedora community adheres to free software principles and doesn’t offer non-free codecs and drivers from it’s repositories. But there are 3rd party repositories which allow Fedora users to get non-free components.

Here is a list of few things you should do after a fresh install of Fedora 20:

Installing Fedy

Fedy lets you install multimedia codecs and additional software that Fedora doesn’t want to ship, like mp3 support, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java etc., and much more with just a few clicks.

Install it via

su -c "curl https://satya164.github.io/fedy/fedy-installer -o fedy-installer && chmod +x fedy-installer && ./fedy-installer"

You can download any of the packages from this point onwards but I feel some of them are essential:

Creating a Template File

Template file is a file in the Templates folder of the home directory. Files added here will appear in the New Documents Menu. Do it via typing this in the terminal

touch ~/Templates/Empty\ File

You can add other types of files in the templates folder and add some default content to it.

For example you can add a new.c file there and write various header files, you usually use, in it. This would **save the hassle of writing it yourself everytime you create a new ‘c’ file.

Installing Yumex

I personally don’t like the new Software manager in Fedora. It has nice UI but often takes a lot of time in loading packages and installing them. Yumex (Yum Extender) on the other hand is a graphical package management tool** which utilizes the power of yum and makes it a bit ‘user-friendly’. I also feel it’s much more easy to use and is a bit more transparent in it’s functionality than the former manager

sudo yum install yumex

You might update your full system after this, as yumex will prompt you for that on it’s start.

From this point onward you can simply search for a package inside yumex, instead of googling the exact package name to be used with yum install.

Gnome-Tweak Tool

This is one of my favorite tools for Gnome Shell. This helps to customize Gnome 3 very easily. It also provides an easy way to install extensions and enable themes Few of the extensions that I’ve are:

You can find more extensions on the official page.

Some of my other settings include enabling Icons on Desktop and reducing the Scaling Factor to 0.9. I also use Droid Sans, Roboto and Consolas as my primary fonts.

There is another tool called dconf editor which is basically a GUI version of the gsettings tool. It also provides some customizations of gnome shell and other applications.

Installing Bleach Bit and Ailurus

After a while a system starts getting cluttered via junk files and caches. Bleach Bit does the task of remove this clutter and useless files easily with a single click of a button. It can be Installed with

sudo yum install bleachbit

Ailurus is a tool to install new Softwares and provide clean-up of caches. It also helps to tweak firefox and RPM Recovery. It can be installed via

sudo yum install ailurus

Getting Firefox Extensions

There are some extensions which are vital for a firefox user. Some of them are:

These settings will provide a system which is good enough for daily use. You might want to install some other applications depending on your use. Some of the other applications include GIMP, Emacs, VLC Media Player, Virtual Box, GParted, Wine, DosBox, etc. to name a few. You can find all the packages by searching for them in yumex