Tips & Tricks for Fedora (and others!)

I honestly can’t remember how I stumbled across this website but there is a lot of useful information there. Rather than go through the 14 pages of tips and tricks I will just highlight some that I found to be very useful and let you go to the source for the rest.

NOTE: These are all tips for Fedora 11, but with some simple tweaking you should be able to apply them to your distribution of choice.

Modify the sudoers file

By default your username is not included in the list of those accounts who can use sudo. To change this do the following (altered to use nano instead of vi because I prefer things that way):

su -c ‘nano /etc/sudoers’

Then find the line that says:

root    ALL=(ALL)       ALL

and below it add

[username] ALL=(ALL)      ALL

where [username] is the username you want to allow to use sudo. Press Ctrl+O and Enter to save.

You can test if this worked by running the following command:

sudo whoami

If it worked you should see the word root. From this point forward I will assume you have given yourself the ability to use sudo.

Let yum downgrade

By default yum does not allow you to downgrade, or revert to a lower version numbered package. If you would like to change this run:

sudo yum install yum-allowdowngrade

To use it run this command:

sudo yum update –allow-downgrade

Add an ‘open in terminal’ option to Nautilus

This will let you right-click on directories and select open in terminal.

sudo yum install nautilus-open-terminal

Then just log out, and log back in.

Use the backspace key to go back a page in Firefox

Open Firefox and in the URL bar type:

about:config

Then use the filter box to search for

browser.backspace_action

Right-click on it and select Modify. Change the value from 2 to 0 and press OK. Restart Firefox.

Force GTK programs to use QT in KDE

I actually tried this and it seemed to work just fine. In fact it might solve some of Dave’s problems. In a terminal run:

sudo yum install gtk-qt-engine

Then log out and log back in. Next go to System Settings > Appearance > GTK Styles and Fonts and select KDE style in GTK Applications.

Many more

As I said there are 14 whole pages of similar tips and tricks available at the website. Check them out for yourself!