I’ve come to really love Scientific Linux, and their version of RHEL 6 is really good for desktop use. This may well be the last great desktop Linux, since we have lost GNOME and KDE both to the eye-candy fanboys who love change for the mere sake of change. Nothing appears set to replace the business-like mainstream desktops we had with GNOME 2 and KDE 3. I note the Trinity Project is keeping KDE 3 alive for Debian-based distros, but the only GNOME 2 forks I know about are either too weak or died aborning. That the upstream RHEL 6 will be viable for quite some time is about the only reason I still use Linux. I will cannot tolerate rolling release nor mandatory punctuated release. I prefer the business-oriented long term support of five years minimum so I can get work done. I don’t use Linux as a hobby or a mere toy. Red Hat and clones are Linux for grownups.
But there are still a few things where SL comes up short of my personal needs. It requires a little research and willingness to get your hands dirty hacking a bit to get everything you might need. Aside from my series of articles still getting heavy traffic here on this blog, I wanted to address some of these more obscure concerns.
When you fetch from outside your repos, or build an RPM yourself, it works best if you keep Yum in the loop. Instead of RPM from the command line, use variations of:
yum localinstall –nogpgcheck some.rpm
SL does not include support for mounting NTFS. If your machine has multiple drives or partitions, or you use recent external hard drives, you’ll need to get that support working. For now the simplest measure is grabbing the package from RepoForge. What you’re looking for is the latest version of their fuse-ntfs-3g for your architecture (i686 or x86_64). It should install without any issues:
yum localinstall –nogpgcheck fuse-ntfs-3g-2010.10.2-1.el6.rf.i686.rpm
The reason I don’t include RepoForge as a regular Yum repository is they dropped libmikmod, among other things I consider a mistake. I need it for things like getting PySol to play background music. For this reason, I prefer ATrpms. You can install their Yum repository directly from the SL repository for Yum packages. I tend to avoid ELRepo because they have an admitted lack of interest in keeping upstream compatibility, and seem almost hostile to the notion of working with any other repositories to minimize conflicts. If you use ELRepo, you really cannot use any other repo. You may be able to pull specific packages and make them work, but most of my use for them is their source RPMs.
Be aware, though, you can often get later versions of most things by scouring the Fedora Core repositories. While RHEL 6 and clones were built mostly from a combination of FC12 and FC13, you can often get SRPMs from later releases to build without hacking the SPEC files too much.
I really do like the way ATrpms includes support for Nvidia drivers. Just run:
yum install nvidia-graphics
It saves a lot of time and hassle compiling the driver yourself, but the RPMs will not fix your Grub menu. You have to manually change the kernel line in your /boot/grub/grub.conf by adding these two items at the end:
rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset
I noticed Elinks was added to the SL repository, and it’s apparently better than the one I used to build myself. I use it quite a bit, along with Lynx.
I always build the latest Lynx browser from a source RPM. Then I change some of the default colors in the /etc/lynx.lss because magenta is hard to read in great quantity. So I change the li to yellow. But since the current active link is also yellow on black, I change the background to red, thus yellow on red is cursor. I also put another line in my .bashrc to prevent strange formatting some pages, which see Lynx centering whole sections:
alias lynx=”lynx -center”
This is a toggle to turn off centering.
I don’t know why Xterm is not included, but I can’t stand using GNOME-Terminal. You’ll need the bitmapped fonts to make it work properly:
yum install xterm bitmap-fixed-fonts
I usually create a launcher on my upper panel (“toolbar”) using this incantation:
xterm -fn 9×15 -bg black -fg lightgray -cr skyblue -sl 2000
That parses out to a 9×15 font for anything larger than a tiny 800×640 display resolution, black background, lightgray default text, a sky blue cursor, and up to 2000 lines of display I can scroll back. I also don’t like plain Bash prompts, so I set this line in my .bashrc:
export PS1=”\[33[0;36m\]\u@\h\[33[0m\]\w\[33[1;33m\]>\[33[0m\] “
This gives me my username at the abbreviated machine name, and the current working directory path, with all that in aqua text with a bright yellow right angle bracket (>). For root, I change the text color to red:
export PS1=”\[33[0;31m\]\u@\h\[33[0m\]\w\[33[1;33m\]>\[33[0m\] “
More variations can be found in the Bash Prompt HOWTO.
The standard GNOME games are not included by default. Worse, they are split into two groups. You’ll need to install gnome-games and gnome-games-extra.
If you want the official Flashplayer, you’ll have to get it direct from Adobe. You’ll get an RPM labeled adobe-release. Make sure you select from the dropdown the YUM version. Install as noted above. This adds Adobe as a repo, and allows updates.
Red Hat has moved away from Aspell and Ispell, in favor of Hunspell. But if you install Opera, for example, you’ll need Aspell. You can have all three spell checkers if you like.
If you want to edit the GNOME menus, you’ll have to install alacarte. It won’t show up in the context menu if you right click on the menu buttons, but it will show up as an item in your System Preferences as “Main Menu”.
For multimedia support, there are two basic routes, and I use both. At a minimum, you’ll need the following:
yum install libdvdcss2 libdvdnav libdvdread lsdvd
The first path is bolstering the bundled Totem player. If you select the following packages, it should pull in all the dependencies necessary to make it play almost anything:
yum install ffmpeg gstreamer-ffmpeg gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-extras gstreamer-plugins-ugly
The second path is using MPlayer and friends:
yum install mplayer
Then you’ll need to get the latest set of codecs from MPlayer HQ. Look for the “all” package with the latest date; the format it YYYYMMDD. For 64-bit, just grab the “essential-amd64” package because it’s all you should need. Unzip and untar, them move the entire collection into /usr/lib/codecs.
I could go on at length, but I’m sure any serious user is likely to find their own customizations. What are yours?
