Fedora 17 uses GNOME 3 by default, so our focus here is to install the SDK. To install packages in Fedora 17, we are going to use the Add/Remove Software tool. This is how we do it:
- Click on the Activities button on upper-left corner of the screen.
- Click on the Applications button.
- Click on the Add/Remove Software button.
- The following tool shows up:
The Add/Remove Software tool shows the database of Fedora 17 packages that we can browse and select. The left-hand side of the screen displays a search textbox, and below it we can see the collection packages. The collection package is a group of packages that serve similar functionalities. On the upper-left corner we can see the place where the search results or the contents of a collection will be displayed, and below it we can see the description box of a selected package we choose in the above area.
The SDK comes in the form of so-called development packages. In Fedora, the development packages use -devel as its postfix on their names. The actual libraries are inside the package without the -devel postfix and they are by default installed when the devel packages are installed. For example, GLib is available inside the glib2 package and the supporting development package is available in the glib2-devel package. Whenever
the glib2-devel package is installed, the glib2 package is automatically installed.
So let's start finding them.
Before a package can be installed with this tool, it must be marked for installation. Head on to the search box and type glib2-devel. Click on the Find button and we will see the search results. It should be a couple of lines with one of them showing the glib2-devel string followed by a long version number (glib2-devel-2.32.1-1.fc17, in my case). Tick on the checkbox to its left. We should see that the tool stamps the icon with a big plus sign, meaning that it is marked for installation. If you don't see a checkbox, it is already installed.
The following table provides a mapping between the package names in Fedora 17 and the GNOME components described in the architecture section earlier. We also want to install the documentation packages (the names are inconsistently postfixed with -doc or -docs). We also will install the tools and basic development packages that we are going to use throughout this book. So let's go ahead with marking these packages in the tool by searching and ticking the checkbox.
|
Subsystem |
Package names |
|---|---|
|
Core libraries |
|
|
User interface libraries |
|
|
Multimedia libraries |
|
|
Data storage |
|
|
Tools and basic development packages |
|
After we mark the packages, we are ready to install them. Just click on the Apply button at the bottom of the screen. We will get a dialog popping up and asking whether we want to install additional packages required by the packages we selected previously. Make a nod gesture to agree by clicking on the Continue button. Then enter the root password and relax for a while as the tool will download and install all the packages into the system. After everything is installed, we will get a new window, as shown in the next screenshot, that displays that there are newly installed applications that we can run; let's keep this dialog for the next chapter.
