SL5 Notes

These are notes for myself to document the tweaks I made to SL5. Peruse if you please.

• Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2: SL5/RHEL5 comes with Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5, which is cool and all, but I want Firefox 2 (mainly for the spelling and because switching between the two types of tab closing styles is confusing) and Thunderbird 2 (just because). To make this work, download the packages from mozilla.com. Untar the packages and move the resulting directories ("firefox" and "thunderbird") to some directory (I used /usr/local/). Go into /usr/bin and move aside the existing launch scripts "firefox" and "thunderbird". Then copy over these scripts from the new packages directories. Edit each script and look for "moz_libdir" and change that to point to the respective directories (ie. /usr/local/firefox and /usr/local/thunderbird). Save, exit and enjoy.
• OpenOffice.org: SL5/RHEL5 comes with OOo 2.0, I wanted the latest and greatest. Anyways, download the OOo package from openoffice.org. Untar it and inside you'll find a directory "RPMS". Installing is as easy as: rpm --ivh *.rpm desktop-integration/openoffice.org-redhat-menus*rpm. Also, I added this line to /etc/yum.conf since yum always wanted to "update" the OOo 2.2 install: exclude=openoffice.org*
• Minimal Black GDM Login: I wanted to go with something uninteresting as my gdm login screen, so I'm using this gdm theme. Just download and save to disk. Go to System | Administration | Login Screen. From the resulting screen, click "Add" and select the file you just downloaded and install it. Then select the newly installed gdm theme.
• Microsoft True Type fonts: Yes, it is not a necessity since there are the Liberation fonts from Red Hat, but it is nice. An rpm package for the Microsoft True Type fonts can be found here. Just download and install with rpm.
• Text Boot: Not necessary, but I like to make my notebooks look old skool, so this is how to do it.
• yum:  I changed the metadata_expire setting in /etc/yum.conf from 72000 seconds to 10 seconds.