I recently got this cutie from Acer. It's purpose is to be my wife's browsing machine. For that I had to modify some things:
- Install Skype
- Install Pidgin
- Upgrade to Firefox 3
- Instal mscorefonts
- Video player with subtitle support
„Advanced Mode“
First thing to do is to enable Xfce menu a. k. a. advanced mode.
Skype
This one was fairly easy, just matter of adding skype repository to the package manager, as described on my-guides.net :First you must install the Skype repository. Open a terminal and type:
$ sudo nano /etc/yum.repos.d/skype.repoIn that file copy the following lines:
[skype]
name=Skype Repository
baseurl=http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/fedora/updates/i586/
enabled=0
gpgkey=http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/rpm-public-key.asc
gpgcheck=1Now you can easily install skype by typing:
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=skype install skype
At any time you can search for updates like that:
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=skype update skype
If you are asked if it is ok to import the GPG signature just type y and press Enter.
Pidgin
If you want to use ICQ on your aspire one, you will need recent version of Pidgin. Acer's IM has some dependencies on same libraries that pidgin uses, so installing is not so straightforward, however, there is this forum post.
- remeove the OLD libpurple plugin
- In package manager, go to List tab (a popup window should appear to read the software info), and type libpurple
- once found, then unselect it (a red dahs will appear at the left); then click apply.
- install pidgin 2.4.3
- go back to Browse tab (it was only this way it worked for me)
- click application in the left window, then go to graphical internet applications
- click on optional packages
- select pigdin and pidgin-libnotify
- then click close
- then click apply
If I remember well, I had to install libpurple by hand (though there was a dependency) as well. Pidgin just wouldn't start without it.
Firefox
Now the harder part: If you want your firefox to be installed the proper way (via yum), you should add remi repository :
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-8.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-8.rpmFollowing many Fedora 8 howto's you try to yum upgrade firefox
, but nothing happens. This is because installed firefox is not a „Fedora
firefox“, instead an „Acer firefox“. You cannot do yum remove
firefox as this would uninstall half of the desktop environment, as it
relies on firefox. What you can do, though is:
rpm -e --nodeps firefox
yum install firefoxThe first one will forcibly remove the old one, without uninstalling packages that depend on it, and yum will install package with highest version available, which is firefox 3 in this case.
Microsoft Core Web Fonts
WHen you start using your freshly installed browser, you may notice, that some of the sites doesn't look quite right (e. g. including aspireoneuser.com). That's because they rely on some of the windows font's. Their linux package is called msttcorefonts, but is not available in Fedora 8. You either need to build it or use package from over here (not tested, I was just looking for the previous link).
Video player
For proper playback of DivX files, and subtitles, included Video Master application is not enough. I installed gnome-mplayer from livna repository. The bad thing is that upgrading mplayer breaks the Video Master, so it's good to replace it in the desktop menu as well.