First of all, mostly because of messy conflicts/dependency problems with the livna repositories, I disabled most repositories: cd /etc/yum.repos.d su (and type root password) mkdir disable mv livna* disable mv atrpms.repo disable mv fedora-development disable mv fedora-updates-testing disable Later some of these repositories are needed again, but not just yet. There is a --disablerepo option for yum, but this works too. Next some generally useful software (all steps as root): yum install tcsh, afterwards you can run chsh for each user to change your shell from bash to tcsh (I prefer tcsh). Here is an example .cshrc file (put in your home directory as .cshrc) yum install mc, a Norton Commander clone, for those of you who remember :-), extremely useful yum install ntfs-3g, to be able to mount Windows NTFS partitions read/write yum install man, for viewing man (manual) pages, as in, for example, man tcsh yum install emacs, an extremely versatile editor. Here is an example .emacs file, with at the top some settings to maximize the editing area (disabling icons, menu, etc.). Put in your home directory as .emacs. In emacs, type Ctrl+h, t for a tutorial yum install bind-utils, for dig, nslookup, and host (name server lookups, e.g. host www.google.com) yum install vixie-cron, for the cron daemon, to be able to run regularly scheduled jobs yum install mlocate, after install run updatedb. Next, you can easily find files by typing locate with (a part of) the filename, for example locate nslookup yum install usbutils (for lsusb, to see what USB devices are attached) Some viewers (from here on I'll leave out the "yum install" before every package name): qiv: an excellent light-weight image viewer. If you also installed mc (see above), then edit the extension file to use qiv for images: F9 -> Commands -> Edit extension file, then in the section include/image, replace display %f & with qiv -R -f %f &. When running qiv, press 'm' to toggle between showing the whole image and the (scrollable) full screen mode evince, a light-weight PDF viewer eog, a pretty good viewer for digital pictures Some internet/network tools: lynx, a text-based web browser telnet gftp, an ftp client with a gui jwhois, for the whois tool xfce4-mailwatch-plugin, an e-mail notifier that sits in the panel, I use it for my gmail account nmap, a network security tool Development tools: gcc make strace Multimedia: xmms Next, we'll install mplayer. First, re-enable the atrpms repository: cd /etc/yum.repos.d mv disable/atrpms.repo . If you'd do yum install mplayer now, you'd get these errors: Missing dependency: libdvdnavmini.so.4 is needed by package mplayer Missing dependency: libpulse.so.0(PULSE_0) is needed by package mplayer Apparently this can be fixed by re-enabling the other Fedora repositories, which can be done quickly by: yum install fedora-release Now you can run yum install mplayer Other useful packages from atrpms: rar, for packing/unpacking .rar archives xv, an excellent image viewer/manipulator ddclient, if you're using DynDNS, for example Next, because I have a "Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2" TV tuner / MPEG2 encoder, I installed mythtv. I'll write a separate page about that at some point. This install downloads about 150 packages, totalling 148MB, so if you don't have a TV tuner, don't bother. Some of the packages in this set are useful, though: wget, a tool to retrieve web pages, (parts of) web sites, from the command line ImageMagick, extremely versatile image manipulation tools, especially the convert tool a lot of video related tools, like transcode, mjpegtools, dvdauthor, etc. After installing all of the above (and doing a yum clean all), I had 2.1 GB free space left of the total 3.8 GB on my Eee 701 :-)