My personal Fedora 9 installation

I have dell xps 1210 and fedora 9 works superb with it.

-partition layout
2 primary partition one for winxp and one for linux. Third partition for data to be shared by both OS. First and third NTFS and formatted 2nd as ext3 using partition magic.

-Dual booting
My winxp was always present but i rarely use it. In order to experint with other OS (to name a few: FreeBSD and fedoras) I installed GAG boot manager.

-Install fedora 9
Download fedora 9 dvd for gnome preferably using torrent. Boot the dvd for install. Do not forget to "remove all linux partitions" (since we had preformatted 3rd partition using ext3) and select advanced boot loader configuration to install linux boot loader on first sector of boot partion instead of MBR.

-what to install
I did not select to install games and java or any other developer tools since i wanted to install them manually. Also do not install open office if you plan intall java manually. open office from software repo install jre 1.5. I wanted everything to run on jdk 6

-post installation
1. Firs thing i configured was my wireless network.
2. Once internet was available i got loads of software updates, of which i updated most using yum and ignored rest.
3. download EasyLife for fedora 9. This does most of the boring but much needed tasks like adding livna repo, installing skype, add flash support to firefox etc. Select whatever you like when you run the script, note that here also i selected not to install java since i wanted the complete sun version instead of almost perfect open jdk implementation.
4. configure skype
Go to skype options - sound devices. For my laptop configuration following works when earphones and mic are plugged in
sound in: usb device 0x46d:0x8c6 (hw:U0x46d0x8c6,0)
sound out:HDA intel (hw:intel,0)
ringing:HDA intel (hw:intel,0)
Play around with the options till you figure out which one is for you. I did the same.
5. install pidgin for all my yahoo/gmail/aol messenger needs using yum
6. installed xmms and vlc for all my audio and video needs
7. installed k3b for all my cd/dvd burning needs
8. I hated the default desktop on this one and even if i changed it, the same old image was appearing on logon screen. Seems some modifications are in plan and i had to use a hack to get what i want. I liked the sulphur wallpaper. So i went to /usr/share/background/waves and edited all the image paths in waves.xml to point to sulphur-on-waves.png located in same folder.

-Note though rpm provides easy interface for installing uninstalling packages, for developer tools i always prefer installing manually for 2 reaons:
1. I can intall latest version which may not be available in rpm
2. I have control over what to install and where to install.

-installing jdk
Downloaded and installed jdk-6u7-linux-i586.bin under /opt. Follow instructions for jdk install for non-rpm binary. It's really sweet.
I had to edit /home/bhupendra/.bashrc to have java_home and path available to bhupendra. However finally decided to add the path to /etc/profile so that it gets available to all users just in case.
As for java plugin for firefox, followed sun java instructions. In /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins made a symlink as follow:
ls -s /opt/jdk1.6.0_07/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so and restarted firefox.

-open office
for open office downloaded OOo_2.4.1_LinuxIntel_install_wJRE_en-US.tar.gz and followed install instructions on site
to uninstall goto /opt/open... and ./setup to start the uninstallation wizard.

-eclipse
downloaded eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz and moved to /opt
tar xvzf eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz
to run eclipse /opt/eclipse/eclipse or goto /opt/eclipse and ./eclipse
if eclipse is ran as user bhupendra, default workspace is created at /home/bhupendra/workspace which was fine with me

-Tomcat 6
downloaded apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz, copied to /opt
tar xvzf apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz
mv apache-tomcat-6.0.18.tar.gz tomcat6 (renames the folder)
goto /opt/tomcat6/bin and to start ./catalina start and to stop ./catalina stop
Also added CATALINA_HOME and tomcat's bin on PATH
I was root when i installed tomcat as mentioned above. Hence i always had to login as root to start/stop tomcat. Note if you do not want to start/stop tomcat using root then goto /opt/tomcat6 and change owner
chown -R bhupendra *

-RDBMS
I was in dilema to install mysql or oracle. Though I had installed and used mysql on windows before, i was using oracle in my office. Hence thought of giving it a try. Plus my friend madhav had already installed oracle on centOS so i knew it would work. After googling for some time, found an excellent writeup for oracle on fedora 9. Only modification i made was instead of having a new oracle user, i used my existing user id so that i could start stop oracle using same user. Also instead of installing to /u01/app/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1, installed at /opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1. Being a lazy bum i created scripts to start and stop oracle from desktop.
#-------------------------------------
#ora_dbca.sh (opens oracle database configuration assistant)
#-------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
/opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/bin/dbca

#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#ora_DB11G_start.sh (starts the DB11G database and listener)
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl start
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart $ORACLE_HOME
emctl start dbconsole


#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#ora_DB11G_stop.sh (stops the DB11G database and listener)
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
emctl stop dbconsole
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbshut $ORACLE_HOME
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl stop