An excellent guide for Firefox setup

This guide contains, among other things, correct instructions for setting up mplayer.

Another (much more complete) guide like mine

Personal Fedora Core 5 Installation Guide

xemacs

Download the latest stable xemacs release here and install it.

Set up bash

All of these settings are to be done in ~/.bashrc

# PROMPT
PS1='\[\e]1;\a\e]2;${PWD}\a\]\n\D{%a %D} \t \w\n \#\$ '

# PATH
PATH="$PATH:/sbin:/home/zhupanov/bin"

Install mplayer to enable video under Firefox

Mplayer download page Instructions for installing mplayer using yum

Here is what I ended up doing the second time, when it actually worked. Note that
installing mplayer-codecs pulls in mplayer and xvid rpms.
Also, I had to download and install mplayer mozilla plugin rpm separately.

$ sudo yum install mplayer-codecs
$ sudo yum install mplayer-codecs-extra

Setup sudo

$ su root
# emacs /etc/sudoers

Add the following line to the User Privilege Spec section:
zhupanov ALL=(ALL) ALL
zhupanov ALL=NOPASSWD

Setup Macromedia Flash for Firefox

IMPORTANT: Make sure NOT to allow Firefox to automatically install flash plug in. It installs the wrong version (8.?.?), which will not work.

To install the right version (7.?.?), I followed instructions found here using yum.
As root, I created a file /etc/yum.repos.d/macromedia-i386.repo with the following contents:

[macromedia]
name=Macromedia for i386 Linux
baseurl=http://macromedia.rediris.es/rpm/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://macromedia.mplug.org/FEDORA-GPG-KEY

Then, I closed firefox, and ran:
$ yum install flash-plugin

Test flash here.

Also run these commands:

[root@localhost zhupanov]# cd /usr/X11R6
[root@localhost X11R6]# mkdir lib
[root@localhost X11R6]# cd lib
[root@localhost lib]# ln -s /etc/X11 X11

Switch from Gnome to KDE

$ switchdesk kde
relogin to make kde active

Manifesto

The purpose of this blog is to document all the steps I took to configure the new installation of Fedora Core 5 on my machine for the purposes of regular desktop use. I decided to do this after 3 reinstallations.