MP3 Support in Fedora 11

Because MP3 formats are patented, and the patent holders have not provided the necessary license Fedora 11 cannot include MP3 support out of the box. However, installing MP3 support is quite simple!

Follow these steps: (Log in/ su as root and install the following repos)
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Additional Plug Ins
yum -y install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly xine-lib-extras-nonfree

Install XMMS Multimedia Player and make is MP3 capable ;-)
yum install xmms xmms-mp3

That's it! type xmms in the terminal, and you can now play MP3 on your Fedora 11 installation!

Adding/ Mounting NTFS partion in Fedora 11

The best way to mount an NTFS partition in Fedora 11 is:

su -c 'yum install ntfs-3g ntfs-config'

The ntfs-config package is as small as 367 kb. Once installed, simply take a backup of the existing fstab file, just in case if you happen to encounter some screw up!

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.original

Now run:

su -c 'ntfs-config'

You will be presented with a nice UI and am sure, it is quite simple to understand what needs to be done, once the application is running :-)

Update Firefox on Fedora 11

So you just installed Fedora 11 and wish to upgrade the pre-installed Firefox 3.5 RC 4 to the stable version, ha? Well, its quite simple! Type in the following command:

su -c 'yum update firefox'

Its about a 28M download. Simply restart your Firefox browser after yum finishes doing its business and you are good to go!

Tourist Pass

So you are new to Mumbai and want to explore the city, but you are extremely scared to travel in our Mumbai local train. You also look at the first class, and think twice... is it really worth spending 90 odd bucks for a single way ticket from Bandra to Churchgate or Bandra to Borivali?

Enter 'Tourist Pass'. Yes! Western Railway has introduced a day Tourist Pass for tourists and people of Mumbai, who just love the city! And a First Class, Unlimited Day pass is available at a dirt cheap INR 170! Yes... can you believe that? Travel throughout the Western line, in your day pass... Enjoy the awesome bandra evenings at Bandstand, or the Churchgate rush hours in the morning... Visit the Dadar market or the over crowded Andheri, or just simply, travel from Churchgate to Virar, in first class. All this for only 170 bucks! Is that not cool?