== What I needed to make my custom Fedora 8 environment work

One of my little peculiarities is that I use a quite custom environment,
one that comes nowhere near a graphical login program, much less Gnome or
KDE. One of the consequences of this is that I get to set up by hand a
number of things that a normal environment runs automatically, like
[[volume management GnomeVolumeManagement]].

These custom things keep changing themselves as I move from version
to version of Fedora, so here is what I had to do to get my environment
running nicely under Fedora 8:

* If you start your X session by hand yourself, you need to run both
  _ck-xinit-session_ and _dbus-launch_ to set up the client environment
  properly:
	_/usr/bin/ck-xinit-session /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session
	~~actual-session-script~~_

  (Normal people probably want to run ((ssh-agent)) too, but I don't
  use ssh keys with passphrases. You can dig this stuff out of
  _/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc_ and associated files.)

* [[volume management GnomeVolumeManagement]] hasn't changed; you
  run '_gnome-volume-manager --sm-disable_'.

* in a change from the [[past GnomeVolumeManagement]], the right
  sound daemon to run is now ((pulseaudio)). I found it necessary to
  remove its PID file beforehand too in order to make sure that it
  always started.

  (The PID file for me is _/tmp/pulse-~~login~~/pid_.)

Getting Flash to work on my 64-bit machine was a little intricate.  I
installed the 32-bit Flash RPM from Adobe's official repository and both
the 64-bit and the 32-bit versions of _nspluginwrapper_, but this still
left it unable to do sound. To fix that I had to install the 32-bit
version of the alsa-plugins-pulseaudio RPM, which I had to fish out
of the i386 Fedora 8 repository by hand (it is not available in the
[[x86_64|]] repository).

(Someday _gnash_ et al will work well enough that I can bid a gleeful
farewell to the 32-bit Adobe Flash plugin, but I am not energetic enough
to fight that particular battle yet.)