Some post-installation steps to make Fedora 19 more comfortable

So, as you may now, Fedora 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat) has released for few days. And this time I decided to upgrade my PC immediately, and everything seems to be very smooth.

For Fedora, I have to make some minor changes to make it more comfortable, such as:

• Install Liberation Fonts (version 2).
• Fix the font's rendering problem.

Liberation Fonts

Liberation fonts are installed in Fedora by default. However, it is kept at version 1.07 with very poor quality. And to get the much better quality, I always upgrade them to version 2.

You can download compiled fonts from the Liberation Fonts page or RPM packages from Fedora's page. I choose the former method.

$ wget https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liberation-fonts/liberation-fonts-ttf-2.00.0.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf liberation-fonts-ttf-2.00.0.tar.gz
$ sudo cp -f liberation-fonts-ttf-2.00.1/*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/
$ sudo fc-cache

Now the Liberation fonts are ready to use. We will fix the font rendering problem before change font settings for GNOME to reflect what we have done so far.

Fix Font Rendering Problem

If you've ever see an Ubuntu screen, you may see a much better font rendering. The problem here is Fedora disable RGBA sub-pixel hinting. All you have to do is to enable such feature by install package freetype-freeworld from RPM Fusion.

$ rpm -ivh ftp://mirror.switch.ch/pool/3/mirror/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/19/Everything/x86_64/os/freetype-freeworld-2.4.11-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm

Now, to change the default fonts and default font hinting methods for GNOME, you should install gnome-tweak-tool.

$ sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool
$ gnome-tweak-tool &

Change the default font settings as in the below screen.

To make everything the same as Ubuntu, you should run the following command.

$ echo "Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault" >> ~/.Xresources

You may need to log out and log in again to reflect the changes.

Activate OpenMPI on Fedora 17/18/19

On Fedora 17/18/19, and some previous version, there is no default link to OpenMPI binaries and libraries. On 64-bit system, they are located in /usr/lib64/openmpi/{bin,lib,share}. To activate them for everyone to use, we have to make some changes as follows.

For OpenMPI's libraries

$ sudo /bin/sh -c 'echo "/usr/lib64/openmpi/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/openmpi-64.conf'
$ sudo ldconfig

For OpenMPI's binaries

$ sudo echo 'export PATH=/usr/lib64/openmpi/bin:${PATH}' >> /etc/profile.d/openmpi.sh
$ sudo echo 'set path = ( /usr/lib64/openmpi/bin ${path} )' >> /etc/profile.d/openmpi.csh

Exit your terminal screen and open it again to activate the new settings.

Done!

@10/Jul/2013: I have made a minor change in title and change the double quote to single quote of the echo command to keep ${PATH} from auto-expansion.

How to Overcome "Nautilus cannot handle smb locations"

I recently meet a problem with Nautilus in accessing the Windows shares or Samba shares. Whenever I tried "smb://" in Nautilus, I received "Nautilus cannot handle "smb" locations". When I tried to use "Connect to Server" dialog, there was no option "Windows share" in Type field.

After looking at a series of posts on the Internet, I have found that it is the problem of GVFS without Samba support. Consequently, the solution on Fedora is very very simple, just install the gvfs-smb package.

# yum install gvfs-smb

Actually, the most time-consuming part is the problem caused by myself, perhaps. There is some conflict between samba4 and samba (3) on my Fedora 17. The _local repository contains libwbclient v4 which is conflict with gvfs-smb which uses libwbclient v3. It takes very long  time to recognize the reason and to solve it. If you meet the same problem on new Fedoras (16, 17) and cannot solve it, please leave a comment here.

How to Change MAC Address on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

On the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora boxes, there is a line named HWADDR in the interface configuration file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, for example, storing the MAC address of the corresponding ethernet interface.

Nothing will happen if you change the MAC addresss in this line, and you will probably receive the following notice when restart the network service.

Shutting down interface eth0:  Device eth0 has MAC address AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF, instead of configured address 00:11:22:33:44:55. Ignoring.

To change the MAC address, just keep the HWADDR as it is, and add the following line to the above file.

MACADDR=00:11:22:33:44:55

Restart the network service.

# service network restart
# ifconfig eth0

New MAC address! Congrats!!!

Note: You should change eth0 to eth1, or the Ethernet interface you want to change its MAC address.