Tweak Your Fedora 22 Desktop Using Fedy And PostinstallerF

None of the Linux distributions comes with all essential applications for daily usage, Agree? You have to install additional Repositories, softwares like Chrome, Flash player, Java or something in order to get a perfect distro for the daily usage. We can do it in two methods. First, you can manually search and install all the required softwares one by one, and the second one is you can use a tool that will help you to find and install all essential applications from one place. Which method would you prefer? I prefer the second method most, not because it is easy, but also it saves some time.

Fedora is not exception too. After a fresh installation, we still need to install some additional important tools, repositories to get a perfect for daily usage desktop. Today, we will discuss about the following two tools which will help us to tweak Fedora desktop after fresh installation.

1. Fedy

Fedy, formerly known as Fedora utils, is a free, simple and open source utility that help you to install collection of useful utilities such as mp3 support, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java and many that Fedora doesn’t ship by default. Fedy lets you to install all the utilities with just a single click and you can customize/tweak your Fedora Linux as per your liking. Not only utilities, we can easily add repositories, so don’t bother about downloading and adding. repo files manually.

Fedy has a built-in-updater, so that it can easily update itself. It, also, will automatically find download links for updates of your software’s, and add repositories wherever possible. So you don’t have to worry about the updates. Fedy is developed by Satya Sahoo and released under GNU GPL V3.0. It can be easily extended via Plugin’s, and the source code is publicly available on GitHub for those who want to play with the source code, and to know what it does exactly.

Install Fedy On Fedora 22

For the purpose of this tutorial, I will be using Fedora 22 KDE.

Download the latest version using the command:

wget http://satya164.github.io/fedy/fedy-installer

Set executable permission and install as shown below:

chmod +x fedy-installer

sudo ./fedy-installer

During installation, It will automatically add some useful Repositories like RPMFusin.

Fedy Usage

Open Fedy, Probably it will be found under System Tools. Make sure you have a decent internet connection. At first launch, it will check for internet connection. This is how Fedy looks at first launch.

Fedy has two sections. One is ‘Apps’ section which contains many useful applications that doesn’t exist in the Fedora default repositories. And the other one is ‘Tweaks’ which will help you to fine tune the Fedora desktop.

Apps

Let us see what will ‘Apps’ section do.

Let us install Adobe Flash plugin.

To do that, click on the Install button of Adobe flash plugin.

You’ll be asked to enter the root password. Enter the root password and click OK.

After a few seconds the selected application will be installed on your Fedora desktop. You will see the ‘Install’ button has switched to ‘Remove’. It means the application is installed. Quite easy, isn’t it?

Similarly, you can install other applications too.

I’d like to install multimedia codecs, so i checked the option Install Multimedia codecs.

Now Fedy will automatically add the relevant repositories that has multimedia codecs and install multimedia codecs on your system. In my system, Fedy automatically added the RPM Fusion repository and installed all required codecs.

You don’t have to manually search and install each codec. Fedy will do it for you automatically, all you have to do is just select the tasks that you want to perform and sit back. Everything will be done by Fedy. After completing the required tasks, click Back to go back to Fedy Main Menu. Interesting app, isn’t it?

Please be mindful that, Fedy doesn’t have any own repository to install softwares. It just adds the repository which has the required software and automatically install them for you.

Tweaks

In this section, we can do some important tasks such as configuring Grub, Improving the font rendering, clean up junk files, configure SELinux , and configure Touchpad etc.

Let us, for example, clean the junk files. To do that, clcik ‘Cleanup’

That’s it. After few seconds, you will see the ‘Task Completed’ message.

2. PostinstallerF

PostInstallerF is a small, lightweight, useful tool that can be used to install 100+ essential softwares, Games, audio/video codecs, and third-party repositories which are not included by default in Fedora, Ubuntu and Manjaro. Initially, It was built only for Fedora distributions, but now it supports some other popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Manjaro. You need an Internet connection to download and install the packages. Keep in mind that PostInstallerF is not a Software Center.

Installation

On Fedora:

Run the following commands one by one to install PostInstallerF on Fedora systems.

Switch to root user:

su

cd to /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory.

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget https://raw.github.com/kuboosoft/postinstallerf/master/postinstallerf.repo

Update the software repository, and install PostInstallerF.

dnf update
dnf install postinstallerf

On Ubuntu:

Run the following commands from your Terminal.

wget -c http://sourceforge.net/projects/postinstaller/files/ubuntu/app-install-data-postinstallerf_1.0-6_all.deb
wget -c http://sourceforge.net/projects/postinstaller/files/ubuntu/postinstallerf_1.5-13_all.deb

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yad

sudo apt-get install packagekit

sudo dpkg -i app-install-data-postinstallerf_1.0-6_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i postinstallerf_1.5-13_all.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

On Manjaro:

wget -c http://sourceforge.net/projects/postinstaller/files/manjaro/postinstallerf-1.5-13-any.pkg.tar.xz
yaourt -U postinstallerf-1.5-13-any.pkg.tar.xz

Usage

Launch postInstallerF either from Menu or Unity Dash. This is the principal menu (main menu) of PostInstallerF.

As you in the above picture, You can do the following from the Principal menu.

Update your system;
Install compress utilities;
Install flash plugins;
Install additional repositories like RPMFusion ;
Install Gnome Shell extensions;
Install audio/video codecs;
And many.

Update your system

Click on the Update button to update your distribution. Click Ok to install updates.

Since, I already updated my system, It displayed “No updates”.

Check list mode

This section is interesting and very useful too. This section allows you to install the best programs, to configure/tune your system functionality, or to shutdown/logout the system.

For example, If you want to install the best programs selected by PostInstallerF on your system, click on the Install button. The following screen should appear. Select the applications you want to install, and hit the OK button to install all applications at once. Or you can manually search and select the applications using the Categories option as shown above.

Now, PostInstallerF will start to download and install the selected applications.

Tweak your system

Do you want to tweak your system as the you want it? then it is possible too. Click on the Tweak button in the principal menu.

This section allows you to do the following things.

Install Broadcom wireless, and Nvidia drivers;
Install Cinnamon/GNOME/MATE/LXDE/ KDE/XFCE desktop environments;
Enable Or Disable Sudo;
Enable or Disable SELinux;
Remove old kernel;
Install Firefox spanish language.

Conclusion

As far as I know, both Fedy and PostinstallerF works great and these are must have tools for avid Fedora lovers. They will definitely reduce your precious time to get things done as quick as possible. Give them a try, you won’t be disappointed.

Cheers!

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