Hands on: Secrets of Fedora 8

ATI and Nvidia hardware drivers are available from livna. With these installed it’s easy to enable Compiz. Unfortunately, the setup is not quite as simple as with Ubuntu, where the necessary package is automatically presented to you for a one-click install. If you have a recent Nvidia card (a 6xxx model or better), it’s all quite simple enough - just install kmod-nvidia:

# yum install kmod-nvidia

Owners of older cards will need to install ‘kmod-nvidia-96xx’ or perhaps even ‘kmod-nvidia-legacy’ (for the oldest cards) instead. Also included in the drivers is a utility to configure them. This can be found under System, Administration, Livna Display Configuration. The driver installation does automatically update the X.org configuration file to use the new drivers, however. ATI owners will probably want to stick with the installed drivers if 3D works already, or try the ‘kmod-fglrx’ package.

Without the binary drivers it is not possible to get hardware 3D support on Nvidia chipsets, but if you do not want to use Compiz or run any 3D applications (mostly games), this should not be an issue.

Once the 3D drivers are installed, enable Compiz by selecting System, Preferences, Look and Feel, Desktop Effects. Here you can choose to enable the desktop cube effect or wobbly windows. If you are a Compiz fan, it is a better idea to stick to Ubuntu for now, as it has a newer version with better configuration options.

If you would like to install Google Earth, you must download the package manually. Save the file GoogleEarthLinux.bin to the desktop. Now right-click on its icon and select Properties, followed by the Permissions tab, and mark the file as executable. This is a necessary step for arbitrary downloaded executable files for security purposes.

Now simply double-click the icon and accept the defaults in the installation pop-up window. 3D graphics support is required for Google Earth to run.

More settings
The language settings during installation only configure the basic keyboard layout. To change the system language from US English, go to the System, Administration, Language menu and select as appropriate. For a more specific keyboard layout, select System, Preferences, Hardware, Keyboard. In a UK installation, ‘Generic 105-key (Intl)’ will be chosen, which is fine for most circumstances. If you have an extended keyboard with multimedia keys, you may be able to enable them in some applications if your model is present.

The file manager, Nautilus, opens a new window by default for every folder you access. It also remembers the position and size of the window when you later access the same folder. Some people like this behaviour, while some loathe it. To change to the more common single-window file browsing, go to the Preferences menu from any file browser window and select the Behaviour tab. Here select the ‘Always open in browser windows’ option.