I use alot of Ubuntu.. and in Ubuntu your first created user always has sudo access.. but in CentOS and in OpenSuse you do not.. so here is how to grant that access..

First in both you log in as yourself and open a terminal.

You then change user to root

su root
Put in your root password when prompted.

Edit the sudoers file
vi /etc/sudoers

in vi ( I hope you are comfy in vi.. I’ll write another post about it soon I’m sure. ) look for a line that sez

root ALL=(ALL) ALL
and add a line under it just like it that sez

username ALL=(ALL) ALL
(replace username with your user’s name.. of course.. )

save the file. (in vi you press esc and then :wq! )

Compiz is one of those.. things that when people see it they tend to Oooh and Aaaah

It’s old..

Anyhoo..

sudo yum install compiz

And restart..

When you log in Click on System > Preferences > Desktop Effects

And click “Enable Desktop Effects”

And you will see this:
The Wobble.

And this, when you press ctrl+alt+right or left cursor:
Lets you switch between virtual desktops.

Also you hold down Ctrl+Alt and Click and drag and it will let you kind of hold and move the cube.

CentOS 5.5 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Source RPM’s.. and is very much NOT a desktop system.. that being said it is more capable than Desktop Linux OS’s that were around when I started with Linux..

Even so.. like many Linux Distributions.. CentOS doesn’t include various software packages to playback MP3′s or Flash or Sun/Oracle Java, because these are all closed source things.  So.. First I’d like to give you a tutorial on how to install MP3 Support using the RPMForge Repositories.

This tutorial was made on a real machine.. my “beater” and not a VM like my previous Java post.

Step 1: Install yum-priorities

Those steps include installing “Yum Priorities” which allows you to have a package listed in 2 repositories and NOT have yum flip out.

sudo yum install yum-priorities

Step 2: Download the RPM File for the RPMForge repository.

http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Step 3: Import the key for the RPMForge repository

sudo rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

Step 4: Install the RPMForge package

sudo rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.*.rpm

Step 5: Update your Yum.
sudo yum check-update
you should also do a
sudo yum update
as this repository has some updated versions of the software you have already.

You now have RPMForge installed..

Step6: Install the Mp3 Codecs.

sudo yum -y install mplayerplug-in mplayer compat-libstdc++-33 gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

You will see dependencies, just let em install.