Additional useful Programs on Fedora

You can get excellent office programs like Libre Office, the web browser Firefox, and music players like Amarok, but you still need some additional programs to make life easier.

VLC

To play videos and music I prefer to use VLC. To install VLC you will need to install the RPM Fusion repository:

sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Now we can use yum to install VLC

sudo yum install vlc

VLC can play about any audio/video format in existence. Due to licensing problems with an open source operating system, you can't play copyrighted DVDs right out of the box. This is easily rectified by installing another package, libdvdcss. To install this package, you need to download the libdvdcss package here. Extract the contents of the tarball (it's a folder) anywhere. Then open a terminal, navigate to where you extracted the tarball, and run the following commands:

./configure

This configures the software, readying it for installation on your particular environment. If there are any errors you will have to fix them before continuing. In my case, I forgot to install the C++ library on my system as I did a minimal install and did not select the developer packages. (I had to install gcc with a sudo install gcc command)

Next is the make. This command will verify the installation process without making any changes to your system. Again if there are any errors you will have to figure out why.

make

If that completes without error, we are ready to install the package. You'll need root access.

sudo make install

That's it, you should now be able to play DVDs on your Fedora machine!

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