How To Install MPlayer in Fedora Core 15?

MPlayer is one  of the best multimedia players ever written for GNU/Linux (yep it's also available for MS windows and Mac OSX, etc). The most powerful part of MPlayer is actually the command line version which you can start by entering "mplayer" in your Terminal once installed.

There is actually nothing that you cannot do with MPlayer. Do you want to correct audio/video syncing issues? or subtitle loading issues?, adding several effects to enhance both audio and video files, etc... it is pretty darn amazing.

But the sad thing is that since it's a command-line based one... almost all of those are hidden in the official GUI version, which is basically a small representation of the what the actual/underline command-line "engine" is capable of.

Anyhow, after installing Fedora Core 15 (with the Gnome3 desktop, hurray!, or maybe not :/ ) you can use the easylife app, which is basically a graphical front-end for installing almost any proprietary under FC... but if you want the old school approach of starting your Terminal and entering command, well lets do it in your way then :).

If you haven't done already, then lets first enable the RPMFusion repository which gives you a lot of the proprietary software pre-builds for Fedora Core. To do that, open your Terminal and enter the below command.

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

Now let's use "yum" and install MPlayer (including the GUI) in Fedora Core 15.

yum install mplayer-gui

That's should do it, enjoy!. 

Install "Tuned", Enhance Your Laptop's Battery Life in Fedora Core!

Laptops, Notebook and Tablet PCs will be the future (wait, they already are, aren't they?). Unlike with Microsoft Windows where the hardware developers are "kind" enough to give software utilities of their own when it comes to optimizing various peripherals such as GPU/CPU/RAM, yet in GNU/Linux this is still somewhat a bit hard.

Although major desktops like Gnome/KDE or XFCE have power managing utilities (GUI) of their own yet other than setting your Laptop into sleep mode or change brightness, etc there are certain things that an OS can do to help you to enhance your battery life which most of those above mentioned apps fail to achieve.

For instance, there are applications that monitors your entire hardware attached to the Laptop/Netbook, etc thus automatically adjust CPU/HDD or Network cards speeds which result in a longer battery life. If you use Fedora Core (15 or below) then there is an application called "tuned" which does exactly that!.

tuned basically has three main "parts". 

Tune it using "tuned" :)...

1. CPU - This portion of the application monitors your CPU and depending on your CPU load it "adjusts" your CPU and lower its power usage, etc.

2. HDD - This monitors the hard disk drive and depending on the HDD usage "tuned" will slow them down (spin down) since HDD is one of the main power consuming hardware attached to your Laptop.

3. Net - This will tune the Network cards depending their "load".

So if you use Fedora Core 15 or below, you can install tuned easily by opening a Terminal and entering the below command.

yum install tuned

Then after the installation is complete, run it using the below command (which will also add it to the "system services").

service tuned start

If you want to make it to run automatically every time your OS boots then, use the below command afterwards.

chkconfig tuned on

Don't expect this app to do "wonders" for your Laptop's battery life, yet it is pretty handy nonetheless. Oh btw, as said, you don't have to do anything, just install and run it... it'll do the rest for you :). Enjoy!. 

easyLife - Installing Proprietary Software in Fedora Core 15 Made Easy!

Unlike with our friend Ubuntu... Fedora Core follows few strict rules of her own. Although we can choose whether to install or not to install MP3 codec by default while installing Ubuntu (within the installer or after), yet with FC, we will never see them shipping anything that "smells": Proprietary.

So after installing Fedora Core 15, if you were wondering about how to install all those proprietary multimedia codecs which enable you to play almost all videos (including DVDs/Blueray, etc) and audios + Flash player, Nvidia/Ati GPU drivers, etc with ease, then you should install an excellent little application called "easyLife".

easyLife is actually a GUI front-end which uses the RPM Fusion repository (third party maintained repository with all the proprietary software for Fedora Core) and certainly makes your life more easier!.

Here are few of the main features...

*. Install all video/audio codecs.

*. Install multimedia players such as MPLayer, Kplayer, K3b (KDE's default CD/DVD burner), Totem, Banshee, Xmms, etc.

*. Install Java (both 32 and 64-bit versions).

*. Nvidia/Ati proprietary drivers (this is pretty useful since FC15 has Gnome 3 installed and it uses Mutter window manager which requires deeper hardware support from your GPU. And in comparison with "free" drivers... the proprietary ones almost always have better performances).

*. Few DVD ripping tools... are just a very few of useful features in easyLife to mention.

So, if you want to install easyLife in Fedora Core 15 (heck yea you want it :P), open your Terminal and enter the below command.

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/easylife-linux/files/easyLife/3.0-0%20for%20Fedora%2015/easylife-3.0-1.noarch.rpm
su -c "rpm -Uvh easylife-*.noarch.rpm"

Enjoy!.