Fedora Install

sudo

The first thing I like to do after installing Fedora on a desktop is setup sudo. This allows the use of root (administrator) commands without needing to login as superuser (su) every time. On this site anytime you see me use a command with sudo in front, this means it requires root access. I do not use it on a server because there is a security risk involved. If someone hacks your password they can have root access to the system, whereas normally they only have user level access and would need to crack an additional root password to severely compromise the system. To setup you first must login as root:

su Password: ********

Now that we have root access type the following into a terminal:

visudo

This opens the file /etc/sudoers in the default editor (vim in Fedora.) Scroll down and find the following section:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere root ALL=(ALL) ALL

Allow additional users to run root commands by adding their username like so:

## Allow root to run any commands anywhere root ALL=(ALL) ALL user ALL=(ALL) ALL

Save the file and exit root by typing 'exit.' Now to execute a command requiring root access you can just type sudo before it like so:

sudo yum update

Networking

One of the most annoying things after a clean install of recent Fedora releases is networking doesn't function correctly right out of the box! At least with Fedora 10 and newer I get a nice red x on the top of the network icon. Sure you can click on it and check box “system eth0” but I want it to work automatically! This is simply rectified by editing the ifcfg-eth0 file and adding ONBOOT="yes" then turning the network server on.

First lets add ONBOOT="yes". Open a bash terminal and type in the following command:

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

If the following line is already there, change the argument to “yes” otherwise add the following line to the end of the file:

ONBOOT="yes"

Next we need to enable networking at boot. Type chkconfig into a terminal and it will return a chart saying what services on installed plus which are on and which are off.

chkconfig

If the chart shows network being off in run levels 3, 4, & 5 you should run this command to turn them on at boot time:

sudo chkconfig --level 345 network on

Like this page? See the rest of my Fedora guides!