How to enable Brightness key in Fedora?

Issue

By default brightness key in your laptop won't function properly with Fedora. For example F6 will be your brightness decrease and F7 will be your brightness increase. While pressing F6 or F7 you may see a bar but there won't be any change in brightness.

Solution 

To make it function properly you need to switch to root user and enter the below two commands

mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

echo -e ' Section "Device"\n\tIdentifier  "Intel Graphics"\n\tDriver      "intel"\n\tBusID       "PCI:0:2:0"\n\tOption      "Backlight"       "intel_backlight"\n EndSection' | tee /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf




Copy paste both commands to your terminal enable brightness key. The brightness is not working because the above configuration file was missing. This file will manages the changes in your display, video card etc.

Fedora yum issue - cannot open Packages index using db5

Error message:

error: rpmdb: BDB0113 Thread/process 4827/140262864070464 failed: BDB1507 Thread died in Berkeley DB library
error: db5 error(-30973) from dbenv->failchk: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db5 -  (-30973)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:

Solution:

Open terminal and switch to root user and do following commands in the same order given below.

 cd /var/lib/rpm

rm -f __*

rpm --rebuilddb

Cursor became invisible in Fedora GNOME 3

Issue:

The cursor became invisible after update. I am able to see the cursor highlights the icon. How to make the cursor visible?

Solution:

You need to open the Terminal window and give the below command. No need for switching to root account.

dconf write /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/cursor/active false

Cause:

There is a update in Fedora which considers your laptop as touchscreen enabled. So for touchscreen laptop it used to invisible the mouse pointer. By giving above command it will make the mouse pointer visible.

If above command doesn't works?

I have dconf installed in my laptop and so I it worked in my first attempt. Suppose if the above command doesn't work install dconf. You should follow below commands to make the mouse pointer visible.

yum install dconf-editor

dconf write /org/gnome/settings-daemon/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad-enabled false

dconf write /org/gnome/settings-daemon/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad-enabled true

Why Fedora have not mp3 support?

People who migrate from Windows to Fedora wonder why doesn't Fedora have mp3 support. Even I wondered for the first time because most of the audio/songs I use have mp3 format. Fedora is maintaining a page as users are coming with same question again and again. You can see the Fedora answer here.

Those who don't have patience to read, here goes what the page says. Mp3 format is patented content and the owner is not allowing full grant to use.

Work around for the problem

By default most versions of Fedora comes with RhythmBox music player. The icon looks like a speaker emitting sound waves. Using this player you can play open audio file formats like ogg and flac. You will get those audio formats from Wikipedia and some free content servers. To make RhythmBox support mp3 format, Open Terminal and switch to administer user.

su

yum --nogpgcheck install http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

Commands explanation

After you give the first command 'su' it will ask for password. You need to enter the root or administrator password. 

The next step is configuring YUM. Official Fedora repository doesn't has mp3 decoder so you are installing third party repository - Livina and RpmFusion where you will get mp3 decoders.

Last step is installation of mp3 decoder. The last command gstreamer-plugins-ugly will make your RhythmBox player to understand/play mp3 file formats. 

Plugins for Fedora 19 to play movies and music

Issue:

Not able to play any movies or musing in my Fedora OS. When I try to open AVI format file it shows following error 

The following plugins are required: 

MPEG-1 Layer 3 ( MP3 ) decoder XVID MPEG-4 decoder

I will walk you through to install this plugins/decoders.

Solution:

Unlike Windows, Fedora won't include all the plugins and decoder out of the box. It is due to some patent or copyright issue. Whatever it may be our intention is to play all video and audio formats. To do so just open terminal in administrator or root login. Then give the below commands. 

Installing RPM fusion repository:

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

Installing Codecs or Plugins or Decoders to run video and music

yum install gstreamer{1,}-{ffmpeg,libav,plugins-{good,ugly,bad{,-free,-nonfree}}} ffmpeg

Installing VLC 

yum install vlc

If VLC doesn't work after all the above steps you need install extra two packages. Refer this article.

Fedora 19 - Install Adobe, flash player, drivers, Google Chrome all at once

A few months ago came the version of the Fedora 19 distribution, plus many updates, brought several new important features. The official Fedora repositories have hundreds of packages, applications and games. But as in most other GNU / Linux distributions do not come by default codecs and proprietary software for licensing reasons, so are not included in any official repository.

Some apps were not found in the official Fedora repositories, for example, the famous open source VLC Media Player, will be included in some proprietary software libraries, and so it is not available in official one. For users who want to install VLC, SMPlayer, proprietary drivers for your video cards AMD and Nvidia, as FFMpeg tools, unrar, unace and etc, you can use the RPM Fusion repository.

ADDING REPOSITORY RPM FUSION

Adding RPM Fusion repository in Fedora 19 is very simple, just open the terminal and type:

chmod + x *. bin
su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm'

ADDING REPOSITORY OF ADOBE

If you want to install the plugin Adobe Flash Player on Fedora 19, you can use the repository offered by Adobe:

For Fedora 19 32-bit:
su
rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

For Fedora 19 64-bit:
su
rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux

To install the Flash Plugin

su
yum check-update
yum install flash-plugin

ADDING REPOSITORY OF GOOGLE

Google Earth and Google Music Manager. In this case, simply install the repository to automatically add the Google apps.

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub
su 
rpm --import linux_signing_key.pub

Fedora OS disappeared after Windows OS update or installation

If you installed Fedora in your system first and Windows OS after it, you may run into an issue Fedora OS no more available in the boot. In this case you need to re-install GRUB bootloader. To install the GRUB bootloader boot from your Fedora DVD installation disk. Booting from disk will give you some option like 'Start Fedora' and 'Troubleshooting'. Don't click on 'Start Fedora' it will simply run the LIVE OS. Click on 'Troubleshooting' and then select 'Rescue a Fedora System'.

You system now boots into rescue mode. Now you can see only a prompt and you won't get any graphical interface. All you want to do is install grub in the first partition of your hard disk. Don't panic just enter the below command after the prompt to install grub.

grub-install /dev/sda1

Above command is to re-install the GRUB bootloader.

Now you need to create a configuration file. This configuration file will add Fedora OS in the boot menu. Use the below command.

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg