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 .

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 hasn't changed; you run ' gnome-volume-manager --sm-disable '.

• in a change from the past , 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.)