Tweaking Your Fedora Installation For Maximum Productivity & Features

Media Codecs - Requires RPMFusion
Media codecs are a bit of a pain under Fedora and even with RPMFusion enabled, but it is not impossible. Media Codecs are an extremely varied topic as far as what you need and when you'll need it, but a general rule of thumb is "ffmpeg and gstreamer".

If you pull up either dnf or your graphical-software-center-of-choice and search for "gstreamer" you will get a wide variety of hits back for packages, but the ones you need are pretty easy to pick out.

The packages you are looking for are almost anything that is titled "gstreamer1-plugins". This will include some packages, such as devel packages, that you don't need but it's a safe and easy route to get the codecs that you need, additionally the ffmpeg project gets you additional codecs and software support. The command for such is:

sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-* ffmpeg

If you don't want the additional packages either because of bloat, or you are on a very small hard drive then the more selective command is:

sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-base gstreamer1-plugins-good gstreamer1-plugins1-good-extras gstreamer1-plugins-ugly gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-extras ffmpeg

VLC - Requires RPMFusion
With RPMFusion enabled vlc is only a command or click away. Simply search for the "vlc" package in your graphical software manager, or install the package by command line via:

sudo dnf install vlc

HandBrake / Libdvdcss - Requires RPMFusion
HandBrake is, from their project page, "a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs." Essentially its a tool to rip DvD's from discs to video files, or to convert an existing video file to another format.

Unfortunately, due to problems with the way HandBrake statically links libraries it is not packaged in RPMFusion. A Fedora packager however was nice enough to create an RPM Repository that includes HandBrake. The repository can be enabled with the command:

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-handbrake.repo

Afterwards the package can be installed with:

sudo dnf install HandBrake-gui

Prior to Fedora 22 the Livna repository provided the package "libdvdcss" but as of today, June 15, 2015-- a month after the release of Fedora 22-- the Fedora 22 repository for Livna still has yet to be created. No word yet on when that will occur or if the Livna maintainer is even taking care of the project anymore.

Luckily the repository we just added packages libdvdcss, to install it run the command:

sudo dnf install libdvdcss

Additional Tweaks and Changes

Just getting a "working" desktop is not everything. Things such as reducing power usage, or setting a better disk scheduler for SSD's, or reducing swapping, or enabling TRIM, cannot be handled automatically by packages. Luckily most of them CAN be handled by running one or two commands, or editing 1 or 2 files.

Powertop Power Usage is one point of contention that has always plagued Linux in one form or another, and awhile the situation does appear to be getting better with the upcoming Linux 4.1 and 4.2 kernels, there are still changes that can be made to decrease wattage further. Enter PowerTop.

PowerTop is a project from 01.org, Intel's Open Source Technology Center, for measuring wattage of and taking optimizing Linux systems power usage. PowerTop is available in the default repositories and can be installed by running

sudo dnf install powertop

PowerTop is not a standard GUI application, and so you need to open a terminal to run it. To ensure proper monitoring its important to let PowerTop calibrate itself to your particular system. Do this by running

sudo powertop –calibrate

and letting your system sit untouched for a few minutes while PowerTop cycles through its various tests to calibrate itself. After the calibration test is complete you can view your information and statistics by running

sudo powertop

Controlling the PowerTop interface is available through the tab, arrow and enter keys, and quitting the interface via 'q' or Esc. Going over to the Tunables page will show a listing of "Good" and "Bad" entries, you can manually switch them by using the arrow keys to go up or down and hitting 'enter' to 'fix' the bad's into goods. Keep in mind that these "Good" settings will only last until your next reboot, thereafter the settings will go back to the defaults. To have these settings always be 'good' and handled for you by default run the commands:

sudo systemctl enable powertop
sudo systemctl start powertop

Disclaimer: There is a reason that these tunables are not 'good' by default. Most of them have to deal with unfortunate hardware not behaving correctly when told to do one of these power saving techniques. Personally I have never had a problem using these tunables, but your mileage may vary. Therefore, if you see your system acting oddly after enabling PowerTop just disable it by executing:

sudo systemctl disable powertop
sudo systemctl stop powertop

And rebooting.