Installing and using Synaptic on Fedora Core 2

Written by Tim Taylor on Jun 28, 2004
Edited by Thomas Chung on Jun 29, 2004

One of the biggest issues with FC2 is trying to add new software. There are a couple different ways to add software in linux, but the easiest is by using an application called Synaptic, which gives a nice GUI to work with. Below are instructions on how to install Synaptic and how to use Synaptic. All these instructions will assume that you have installed FC2 and have a working Internet connection.

First thing to do is to install synaptic. To do this, login (not as root), and open a terminal:

Then, switch user to root by typing su - :

$ su -

Then, edit yum config file in order to download Synaptic:

# gedit /etc/yum.conf

Then add the highlighted text into the file and save the file:

Here is my yum.conf

Then, quit the gedit program, and type yum install synaptic to install synaptic:

# yum install synaptic

Then, run synaptic:

The first time you run it, it will say 1 package is broken. To fix that, just choose the menu option to fix broken packages:

Then, add 2 repositories via the menu option:

Add this repository:

And then this one:

Then update the information by clicking on Refresh:

That will take a little while, then start looking for the packages you want. Use the find utility:

I'll use Macromedia's flash as an example:

Synaptic will find everything that says flash. Just click on the right arrows to expand the choices, highlight the package, and click on Install:

Keep finding and choosing packages until you're ready to download and install them. Then click on Apply:

That's it. Some popular packages are:
xmms-mp3
flash
java
totem (for playing multimedia files and DVDs)