My personal Fedora 17 install and setup guide...

Update: Since first writing this, I have found this awesome little utility that automates many of the steps here. Please be sure to check it out!

I know there are folks out there who are currently Ubuntu users that might want to give Fedora a go like I did. Fedora is a little different in that it adheres more closely to Free Software standards (which I think is great). There are still, however, quite a few things I'm not willing to give up personally for the sake of software freedom (yet). Among those are Google Chrome, Virtualbox, Flash, Dropbox and MP3 playback.

Following is the process I went through to get Fedora 17 set-up and packages I needed installed.

We will need to add a few repositories along the way.

The first one is RPM Fusion. This repo is a 3rd party supplement to Fedora (and RHEL/CentOS) that allows for installation of various non-free bits. There is quite a bit there, but I'm primarily concerned with getting MP3 playback.

To get this repo installed, simply execute the following in a terminal (blogger breaks this up a bit - this should all be one command):

sudo yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Now, we can install the packages needed for MP3 playback:
sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Next we need Adobe Flash:

(In a terminal:)

For 32-bit:

sudo rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm 
sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux


For 64-bit:

sudo rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm 
sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

Now, simply:
sudo yum install flash-plugin

Next, let's add VirtualBox:


Open a terminal and change to your /etc/yum.repos.d folder. Once you have done that, you can simply download the repo file:
sudo wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo


You could also create the file by hand, if if you wanted:


sudo touch virtualbox.repo
followed by: 
sudo vi virtualbox.repo


Replace 'vi' with your editor of choice...nano is easy to use if you aren't familiar with vim.
Include the following in your new file:


[virtualbox] 
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch - VirtualBox baseurl=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/$releasever/$basearch 
enabled=1 
gpgcheck=1 gpgkey=http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc






We now need to make sure our system is up-to-date:


sudo yum update


If you updated your kernel packages in the previous step, go ahead and reboot now.


Once you've rebooted, we can install a few prerequisite packages:


sudo yum install binutils gcc make patch libgomp glibc-headers glibc-devel kernel-headers kernel-devel dkms


And finally, VirtualBox itself:


sudo yum install VirtualBox-4.1


We can now build the VirtualBox kernel module:


sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup


And add VirtualBox User(s) to vboxusers Group (Replace user_name with your own username).


sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers user_name

Since I first wrote this article I've discovered that VirtualBox is in RPM Fusion, so this step is pretty unnecessary. Also, RPMFusion has an akmod package to keep the modules up-to-date.

sudo yum install VirtualBox akmod-VirtualBox


You will need to reboot before using Virtualbox.

Now for Dropbox:

Open a terminal back up, and 'cd' into your /etc/yum.repos.d folder once again, and download the repo file:

sudo wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30876345/repo/dropbox.repo

You could also create the file by hand, if if you wanted:

sudo touch dropbox.repo
followed by: 
sudo vi dropbox.repo

Include the following in your new file:

[Dropbox] 
name=Dropbox Repository 
baseurl=http://linux.dropbox.com/fedora/$releasever/ gpgkey=http://linux.dropbox.com/fedora/rpm-public-key.asc

After that, simply:

sudo yum install nautilus-dropbox

Now, let's tackle Google Chrome. Go back into /etc/yum.repos.d in your terminal, and create the repository file:

sudo touch google-chrome.repo

and

sudo vi google-chrome.repo

and add the following to the repo file:

(If 32-bit):

[google-chrome] 
name=google-chrome - 32-bit baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/i386 
enabled=1 
gpgcheck=1 
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

(if 64-bit):

[google-chrome] 
name=google-chrome - 64-bit baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64 
enabled=1 
gpgcheck=1 
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

Now, you can install Google Chrome with any of the following 3 commands:

sudo yum install google-chrome-stable
sudo yum install google-chrome-beta
sudo yum install google-chrome-unstable

I have always run the beta version personally - nice mix of bleeding edge and stability

Finally, you may want to enable Infinality's font rendering patches - they are very nice, and I reccomend them:


sudo rpm -Uvh http://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/infinality-repo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

sudo yum -y install freetype-infinality fontconfig-infinality libXft-infinality


You will now be well on your way to getting Fedora 17 set up quite nicely for desktop use. There are obviously a few more packages I install, such as: Filezilla, htop, gimp, git-core, curl and a few other odds and ends I can't think of at the moment.

Happy computing!