WINDOWS N LINUX SOFTWARE

Getting APT
If you don’t yet have APT installed, get it now, because it’s going to make your life a lot easier. If you’re using RH4 or FC3, you can download it from the DAG website at http://dag.wieers.com/packages/apt/. (Read more about DAG in the sidebar “Dig DAG.”)
Dig DAG
DAG is part of a new file repository network known as RPMForge, which includes FreshRPMS, dries, DAG and PlanetCCRMA. Not only does this network provide the added packages that you need for multimedia and all kinds of other good stuff, but it also serves as a FC3 update mechanism for the base operating system. Once you have this version of APT, updates are a breeze. Issuing apt-get update; apt-get upgrade from the command-line will bring your system completely up-to-date.
At the time of this writing, the latest version of APT was apt-0.5.15cnc6-4.1.fc3.rf.i386.rpm, but grab whatever is the latest one available for FC3.
If you’re using Firefox as your web browser, click on “Tools, Downloads, Open” and click on the APT RPM file. Follow the prompts to install the package on your system. If you aren’t signed in as the root user, the Fedora package manager prompts for the root password.
If you’re using RH4, make sure to download the file made specifically for that distribution. There are some other gotchas for RH4; for more information, see the sidebar “Configuring APT for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
Configuring APT for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
If you’re using Red Hat Enterprise Workstation 4 (RH4) and the RH4 version of DAG’s APT package, some of the APT sources for RPMForge are commented out, such as the ones for “OS,” or operating system updates for Fedora Core 3. Do not enable the FC3 OS updates, because it could corrupt your RH4 install.
Having said that, you can enable the regular DAG FC3 feed in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dag.list as follows:### Dag RPM Repository for Fedora Corerpm http://apt.sw.be fedora/3/en/i386 dag### Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linuxrpm http://apt.sw.be redhat/el4/en/i386 dag
Here, both the FC3 and RH4 repositories are enabled. If you don’t turn both of them on, you won’t get access to some of the extra multimedia goodies built originally for FC3. Capiche?
I Want My MP3!
Now that APT is installed, open a terminal window, become root, and issue the following (rather long) command:# apt-get install xmms xmms-mp3 xmms-wma xmms-flac xmms-aac xmms-skins mpg321 lame grip rhythmbox
This installs the X Multimedia System, the MP3, Flac, AAC, and WMA extensions for XMMS, a command-line MP3 decoder, the lame MP3 encoder engine, Grip, a GTK+- based CD ripper and MP3 encoder program, and Rhythmbox, an MP3/CD jukebox program with iPod connectivity. All of these should show up in your respective KDE and GNOME menus under “Sound and Video.”
XMMS in and of itself has a lot of extra add-ons available, so if you want all of those as well, run apt-get install synaptic. Synaptic is a GUI-based front end to APT, and allows you to do visual searches on names of packages. If you do a search on xmms, you’ll see all the extra stuff you can add in.