First, empathy, the new default chat client, does video. But to make it work seamlessly with your friends who use GoogleTalk on Windows, you’ll need all the gstreamer plugins. Here’s how to get them:

sudo yum install gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-* -x *devel -x *docs

Second, Google Earth is a pretty sweet program. But to make it run on 64-bit linux, you need some compatibility stuff added in. Here’s how to get it working, courtesy of bigjim-network

So, I didn’t know this, and I’ve been installing TrueCrypt from source every time I update my system, but via a comment on this guide page I found out that RealCrypt is a rebranded version of TrueCrypt that’s available in the RPMFusion repository. Hello, encrypted files (with no compiling required).

Just thought I’d share the knowledge since it’s Data Privacy Day.

I discovered yesterday after deciding to check in on the state of Fedora 11 on aluminum MacBooks that they have the trackpad working now! And it doesn’t even require any editing of fdi policy files, it Just Works(TM). You may recall my dismay at Fedora 11’s poor showing when I first installed it, but with the touchpad working it was too good to resist. So I promptly pulled out my Fedora 11 netinstall CD and went to work. It’s nice to be able to use my printer again and feel more secure with full-disk encryption. The reason I made the trip over to Derek Hildreth’s excellent guide was that I saw an article on Phoronix which, while proving Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11 neck-and-neck in performance, extolled the virtures of Fedora 11’s etx4 filesystem and newer kernel. So I’m back with Fedora 11 on my MacBook, and while Ubuntu was nice, I’ve been using Fedora since Fedora Core 4 and it just feels like home.

So far, after a day of use, I’m completely unimpressed. Fedora 11 fails to even recognize the trackpad on my MacBook; while in Fedora 10 I couldn’t enable multi-touch options, at least the trackpad worked! Also, the default browser is Firefox 3.5.4b, which is still beta - and I get that this is Fedora, so it’s supposed to be the bleeding edge and all - but seriously, Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is not ready to be a default browser. GMail doesn’t even load correctly!

Get to the download page! Do it now!

Via Slashdot, I stumbled upon several articles answering that question. So here’s my answer.

I started using Linux in mid-2003. I had received $2000 to build a computer for Christmas 2002 (and nothing else, either for Christmas or my birthday, that year) as I was at the point in high school where I really needed one and interested in learning how to put my own together. Knowing that I could spend an extra $100 on slightly better hardware if I didn’t pay for Windows 2000, I obtained a copy from a friend… yes, illegally. Convinced over a six-month period that Windows 2000 was too much work, and that it was probably a good idea to go along with existing copyright law whether I thought it was good or not, I started to seek alternatives. A classmate gave me a copy of Slackware, but text-based installation was a little intimidating. Finally, a friend who was a Linux administrator at the local community college gave me SuSE 8.1… and it was great! Now, by great I mean it worked, and I embarked on the long quest to figure out how to do all the things I was using Windows for. I had already been using Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, so that was easy enough, but what about the games??? No dice. Wine? Needs 3D acceleration. That means getting graphics card drivers… and I had a Radeon. Not an auspicious start, as those of you with ATI cards probably know, but after months of fiddling with it and getting deep into the command line, my interest shifted. The rest is history. When Novell bought SuSE, I bought Fedora 4 Unleashed and switched distros. I’ve used SuSE 8.1, 8.2, and 9.0; Slackware 11.0, and Fedora 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10. Can’t wait for 11!

[EDIT 29 Jan 2009:] I just figured out something very important. Upon completion of the “Firefly” series on Hulu.com, I pop in my DVD of Serenity, and… nothing. VLC won’t open it, neither will xine, nothing. Having used libdvdcss in the past, I immediately go to yum and try to install it, but it isn’t there. Afer searching teh blagoweb for several minutes, I finally find, in a comment on this post, that the repo at rpm.livna.org is still up to serve one package that RPMFusion refuses to carry. Guess what that package was? The first long command in this guide now installs the livna repository and libdvdcss.[/EDIT]

I love this stuff. The background is from Stratification, edited to reflect that this is no ordinary Mac. Yes, I blurred out the names… but that’s the only editing done on this screenshot. Enjoy. I’ll post an explanation of my desktop software sometime in the future.

Update to this post about installing Fedora 10 on a brand-new MacBook…

To make the sound work, at least from the headphone jack, I had to run this command, from a guide Naresh put up on his blog…

echo “options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3” >> /etc/modprobe.d/sound

This sets the soundcard model option for the sound server. I then followed this guide to get PulseAudio running by changing one line of the pulseaudio config file /etc/pulse/default.pa, adding tsched=0 to the end of the line load-module module-hal-detect. It also directed me to install a bunch of PulseAudio packages, some of which don’t exist and others I didn’t need. The command I ended up running is below. I’m not sure if all of these packages are necessary; most of them were already on my system. In any case, sound works now. Out of the headphone port.

I own four computers. Three of them actually work. All three run Fedora 10.

In preface to my earlier post about Fedora 10 on my MacBook (yes, I know that prefacing something that’s already happened is backwards, but I’m doing it anyway), here’s a guide to installation and post-install configuration of Fedora 10 for my uses. YMMV. Note: all commands meant to be performed as root.

1. Get Fedora.

2. Install Fedora. I always separate my /home directory on its own partition and use a 2GB swap partition.

That’s right, folks, I’m running Fedora 10 on my shiny new MacBook 5.1… and you can too!! Here’s how to do it.

1. Partition your harddrive with BootCamp. My harddrive is 160 gigs (yes, I bought the cheapest MacBook since it was all I could afford), so I shrank the Mac OS X HFS+ partition to 40 GB and left the rest for “Windows.” Note: don’t actually install Windows, just exit BootCamp once the partitioning is done.