It has been awhile and I have been meaning to update the story so far. Well you are probably aware that after much delay due to Xen, Fedora has released the test 2 version of Fedora Core 6. I have not yet tried to install it since it came out a few days ago (August 7, 2006) and I did not want to rush out and download it. When it goes to test 3, maybe I will download it and give you the advance scoop. In the meantime, let's talk about other stuff that is going on.
Some of you have written in to give me a solution to my woes about the thunderbird icon. As usual,
Fedora has decided what is best
for you and deleted the icons necessary for display when thunderbird is minimized or simply the icon in the upper left hand
corner of the application. Of course, depending on your theme, you may have decided not to have any icons in that
corner. Well, looks like the solution is simple but should not be necessary. You will need to get hold of the icons
from somewhere; you could download the thunderbird tar.gz file from Mozilla or download from here (see resources).
Once you download them, you will need to copy that directory to where thunderbird is installed. In my case, since this
is a 64bit installation, it is
I just discovered that the latest version of rhythmbox (0.9.5) finally is able to display the album covers. Needless to
say, it is not part of Fedora Core 5. So, I went to the rhythmbox homepage and download the source. It was not very
difficult to
make and install. However, you will need to do a couple of things. Also, take care to install in
First install the gstreamer development packages.
yum install gstreamer-plugins-good-devel
yum install gstreamer-plugins-base-devel
yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad-devel
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly-devel
Now install the Nautilius CD burner development package. Rhythmbox will not compile without this. Unfortunately, it is hardcoded into the system. So, do
yum install nautilus-cd-burner-devel
Once you are done with the above, you can compile the install rhythmbox. In case you are not familiar with that, you simply do
./configure --prefix=/usr
make; make install
Now rhythmbox should be installed over the old one. If you go into the Application menu, you should see your new rhythmbox. You can verify this by checking the version. Once you have done, configure the plugins to download lyrics, etc. Enjoy.
You will notice that the documentation is a little skimpy. In case you want to add radio stations, you will either
need to know the URL of the station or you will need a little ingenuity. What I do is usually head over to Shoutcast,
select the station I want to listen to, then simply drag the tune in icon 
to the Radio
Stations. You can then collect a bunch of stations corresponding to your eclectic taste and listen to music or talk or
whatever while you work or play. You can customize each of the stations by right clicking on it and then give a more
meaningful title. Change the genre to match while you are at it.
