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Change GDM Background and other Settings at Login Prompt

You basically need to change settings as the "gdm" user to change setting at the GDM login.

Do the following first:

su -
xhost +

Then you can use sudo to run programs as the gdm user. To change the background do the following:

sudo -u gdm gnome-control-center

Then click Background. There you can go select a background.

If you have gnome-tweak-tool installed another change I like to do is to show the date along with the clock at the top of the screen you can do this with the following:

Setting Up Minecraft in Fedora

First download the Sun/Oracle JRE from their web site in RPM format. The JRE in Fedora does not work. You have to get the one from Sun.

Install it:

yum install ./jre-7u55-linux-x64.rpm

Create a directory for it:

mkdir -p /opt/minecraft/client/

Download the software from here:

cd /opt/minecraft/client/
wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftDownload/launcher/minecraft.jar

Download the icon:

Remove Accent Characters From Subtitle File

The method below can be used to convert any accent characters to "?" in a text file. This method can be used to strip accent characters from a subtitle file. The purpose for this is some muxing programs such as dvdauthor will error out when finding these characters.

The method below just converts them to "?". But you can write the results out to a different file then diff against the original to figure out where the characters are then manually convert them if you like.

Getting the Java Plugin to Work in the Browser

I first tried to use the OpenJDK project but could not get it to work.

I ended up having to download an RPM of the official JRE from sun.

http://java.com/en/download/

I then installed it (replace the file name below with the name of the file you downloaded).

yum install ./jre-6u30-linux-i586.rpm

Then created the following directory if it does not already exist.

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins/

Next setup a symlink. The following will work for the 32-bit version.

Using WNA3100 Netgear N300 Wireless USB Adapter in Fedora

First install ndiswrapper

yum install ndiswrapper kmod-ndiswrapper

If that also upgraded kernels you will have to reboot at this point to use the new kernel that matches the version of the ndiswrapper kenrel module installed.

Now download the driver files needed from the link below.

http://www.kevinfowler.net/Netgear-WNA3100.tar.gz

Untar it then install the driver with ndiswrapper.

tar zxvf Netgear-WNA3100.tar.gz
cd Netgear
ndiswrapper -i bcmwlhigh5.inf

Now load the kernel module.

Setting Up a VNC Server to View Local X-Session in Fedora 15/16 - UPDATE

*** UPDATE: This is now not needed in Fedora 16. They finally added a program for turning it on the old way. Just go to Internet then click on "Desktop Sharing". ***

This is the equivalent of turning on the "Remote Desktop" support in Fedora 14 and below. This feature is one of the many missing from Gnome 3.x. The following method will allow it to work again in Fedora 15/16.

Install x11vnc package.

yum install x11vnc

Run the following as the user who's session you want to VNC to. When prompted enter the password you want to use to connect with.

Setting Up Android Development in Fedora 16

Download the latest version of the Android SDK from here (the latest version of this post is r15):

http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Untar into your home directory and setup a symlink to it:

cd ~
tar zxvf Downloads/android-sdk_r15-linux.tgz
ln -s android-sdk-linux android

Add the following to your path by editing .bash_profile and append the PATH variable. Then log out and back in for it to take effect.

$HOME/android/tools:$HOME/android/platform-tools

Install Java:

Installing "Google Picasa for Linux" in Fedora 14+

First setup the Google repositorys.

Now, create a file called /etc/yum.repos.d/google.repo and put the following in it:

[google]
name=Google - i386
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

[google-testing]
name=Google Testing - i386
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/testing/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

NOTE: In the above example I have both the regular and testing repos enabled. If you are not feeling cutting edge change the enabled field to 0 under the testing section.