Last week I was having a nightmare with StarCraft II v1.5.2: Network DEsync Issues. To try and fix this I did a lot of drastic file removals. After this many windows programs were slightly disabled (If they weren’t already that way to begin with). I decided to do a complete reformat of my C drive and start from scratch again. It had been almost 3 years since I last reformatted so it was well overdue.
One of my mates has been urging me to migrate across to Fedora Linux. Being a hardcore gamer I was very sceptical at first, as I still needed to be able to play almost all windows games as they are released. He later informed about PlayOnLinux which makes the entire Wine configuration a breeze. With that knowledge I decided to give Fedora 17 a try.
Oh, BTW, after installing Fedora 17 Linux and PlayOnLinux. I then installed StarCraft II, 8GB download later I could login and attempt a Co-Operative game. You know what? It worked perfectly. So that fixed all my preivous DEsync issues. lol.
Installation
I proceeded to the Fedora 17 Linux Distribution Download page and downloaded the 64 bit version. Using Fedora’s liveUSB Tool, I read the How-To and created a USB Installation Disk. After a quick reboot, and changing the BIOS to boot via USB, the Fedora image booted and it started its usual boot-up sequence.
Once it booted up I was already inside of Fedora 17 Linux. Prompted with the option ‘Try Fedora’ or ‘Install to Hard drive’. I already knew I was going to install it, so that option was made for me.
After clicking ‘Install to Hard drive’. I set up my partitions to the way I found most efficient, 4GB for SWAP, 35GB for /ROOT and the remaining 100GB for /HOME. Even though I could disable my SWAP space, seeing I have 15.6GB of RAM, I decided against it for now. Clicking through to the end of the installer, which only took about 5 minutes, I was prompted to reboot.
Bingo, Fedora 17 Linux is now installed and running form the hard drive.
Applications
To try and make my transition to Fedora 17 Linux a little easier, I tried to find a few programs I was already very familiar with.
- nautilus-open-terminal [LINK]- If you use terminal a lot, you may want to have ‘Open in terminal’ in folders in Nautilus file manager. It is an indispensable right-click feature to speed up your programming.To Install- Install nautilus-open-terminal via Yum
yum -y install nautilus-open-terminal
- PlayOnLinux [LINK] – A Gamers Dream – PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft® Windows®.Few games are compatible with GNU/Linux at the moment and it certainly is a factor preventing the migration to this system. PlayOnLinux brings a cost-free, accessible and efficient solution to this problem.What are PlayOnLinux’s features? Here is a non-exhaustive list of the interesting points to know:
- You don’t have to own a Windows® license to use PlayOnLinux.
- PlayOnLinux is based on Wine, and so profits from all its features yet it keeps the user from having to deal with its complexity.
- PlayOnLinux is free software.
- PlayOnLinux uses Bash and Python.
Nevertheless, PlayOnLinux has some bugs, as every piece of software:
- Occasional performance decrease (image may be less fluid and graphics less detailed).
- Not all games are supported. Nevertheless, you can use our manual installation module.
To Install – Install Wine, Add PlayOnLinux Repository to Yum, Update all packages, Install PlayOnLinux via Yum
yum -y install wine wget http://rpm.playonlinux.com/playonlinux.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/playonlinux.repo yum -y update yum -y install playonlinux
- Deluge [LINK] – a uTorrent Replacement -Deluge is a full-featured BitTorrent client for Linux, OS X, Unix and Windows. It uses libtorrentin its backend and features multiple user-interfaces including: GTK+, web and console. It has been designed using the client server model with a daemon process that handles all the bittorrent activity. The Deluge daemon is able to run on headless machines with the user-interfaces being able to connect remotely from any platform.Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins.Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. It is our belief that downloading shouldn’t be the primary task on your computer and therefore shouldn’t monopolize system resources.Deluge is not designed for any one desktop environment and will work just fine in GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. We do our best to adhere to the freedesktopstandards.To Install- Install Deluge via Yum
yum install deluge
- VLC [LINK]- A Universal Media Player – VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.To Install- Install VLC via Yum
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm yum -y install vlc
Screenshots
Below you can see the default theme and background. Which was the first to go.
Clik here to view.
Fedora 17 Now Running – Default Theme
And here is the start of the custom theme. Woot 15.6gb of RAM and6.7TB of disk space. Very nifty little info.
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Fedora 17 Now Running – About Page
My desktop is very clean and crisp. I love it.
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Fedora 17 Now Running – Full Desktop
Nautilus will never look the same. Yay!
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Fedora 17 Now Running – Nautilus Dark Theme
Other Links
Link: The Perfect Desktop – Fedora 17
Link: 20 Things to do after installing Fedora 15
Conclusion
What you think of the theme? and should I stick with Fedora 17 Linux?
I will continue to post my experiences with the operating system and my struggle as a hardcore windows gamer. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.