The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 17

This tutorial exists for these OS versions

1 Preliminary Note

To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the Fedora desktop to have the following software installed:

Graphics:

Pinta - open source drawing application modeled after Paint.NET

KolourPaint - paint application with elemental functions
MyPaint - paint application with a large variety of brushes

The GIMP - free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop
Shotwell Photo Manager - full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop

Internet:

Firefox

Opera
Chromium - Google's open-source browser

Thunderbird - email and news client

Evolution - combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions

Deluge - free cross-platform BitTorrent client

Transmission BitTorrent Client - Bittorrent client
Vuze - Java BitTorrent client
qBittorrent - free alternative to µtorrent

Marble - desktop globe similar to google earth

GoogleEarth - Google's desktop globe

Flash Player 11
FileZilla - multithreaded FTP client
Pidgin IM Client - multi-platform instant messaging client
Skype
Dropbox Client - cloud storage
Gwibber Social Client - open-source microblogging client (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Office:

Adobe Reader

Evince - document viewer
Okular - document viewer

LibreOffice Writer - replacement for Microsoft Word
LibreOffice Calc - replacement for Microsoft Excel
GnuCash - double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken
Scribus - open source desktop publishing (DTP) application

Sound & Video:

Banshee - audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods

Amarok - audio player
MPlayer - media player (video/audio), supports WMA
Rhythmbox Music Player - audio player, similar to Apple's iTunes, with support for iPods
gtkPod - software similar to Apple's iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini
Sound Juicer CD Extractor - CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs
Nightingale - audio player similar to Winamp, but not yet as feature rich (Songbird fork)
XMMS - audio player similar to Winamp
Clementine - Amarok 1.4 fork
Exaile - audio player

VLC Media Player - media player, plays all kinds of videos (video/audio)

Totem - media player (video/audio)
Xine - media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs

Winff - free video converter

SoundConverter - free audio converter

K3B - CD/DVD burning program

Brasero - CD/DVD burning program

Audacity - free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor
dvd::rip - full featured DVD copy program
Multimedia Codecs

Programming:

KompoZer - WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Macromedia Dreamweaver, but not as feature-rich (yet)

Bluefish - text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages

Eclipse - Extensible Tool Platform and Java IDE

Other:

VirtualBox - lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don't have to entirely abandon Windows
TrueType fonts
Java
Read-/Write support for NTFS partitions
gedit - simple text editor

Part of our desired applications are available in the Fedora repositories, and some of these applications have been contributed by the community. Many have to be downloaded from their homepages.

The software provided in the above list covers most of the basic tasks one may need to do on their desktop computers, sometimes there are multiple choices for same functionality. If you know which one you like best, you obviously don't need to install and test the other applications, however if you like choice, then of course you can install more than one.

I will use the username howtoforge in this tutorial. Please replace it with your own username.

2 Installing The Base System

The installation of the base system is easy as 1-2-3 because the Fedora installer doesn't offer a lot of options to choose from, so you cannot go wrong.

Download the Fedora 17 iso image from http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora, burn it onto a disk, and boot your computer from it:

Install by clicking Install to Hard Drive:

Select your keyboard layout and click the Next button to continue:

I assume that you use a locally attached hard drive, so you should select Basic Storage Devices here:

If you see the following message (The storage device below may contain data.), please click on Yes, discard any data because we want to install a fresh system (all existing data on the drive will be deleted):

You can leave the hostname as is and click on Next:

Then choose your time zone:

Type in a root password (twice to verify it):

The default partitioning is ok, so you can hit Next:

Confirm by clicking on Write changes to disk:

The installation starts. This can take a few minutes:

The installation is complete. Click on Reboot and don't forget to remove the Live CD from the disk drive before the system boots again!

Choose the Fedora desktop upon reboot:

If the system is booting for the first time, the first boot wizard comes up. Click on Forward...

Read the License information and proceed:

Then add a regular user account to the system (I will create the user howtoforge here):

Set date and time. If you have internet access, it's a good idea to synchronize them over the network. Check the appropriate box if you want to do that and proceed:

On the next screen you can send details about your hardware to the Fedora project to help them develop the software. It's up to you whether you want to submit these details or not:

Now that we are finished with the first boot wizard, we can log into our new desktop with the user we've just created. The name that will be shown to you is not the username but the one you entered in the Full Name field: