FC4 issues: yum, sound,midi

[rakesh09]

Well, I recently installed FC4 and was impressed... bootup times were much faster and things ran smoother. Just that I face some nagging issues :

1] yum : I need to go through a HTTP proxy requiring authentication. The obvious way is to put the environment variable $http_proxy=http://userass@proxy.foo.barort/. I prefer not to store my pass in plain-text.. and as an environment variable.. is there a workaround?

2] I play music using xmms ; got the xmms-mp3 plugin from the freshrpms repo. I have noticed that sound is not quite as good as in windoze, and is noticeable at higher volumes. I also know this is not necessarily true for linux as when i had suse 9.1, the sound clarity was amazing, clearly better than windoze. If I recompile xmms from source, will it change anything? Or are there any steps to tweak the sound config? That aside, Gaim sounds are _really_ distorted.

3] I simply cant get to playback midi files .. any help welcome.

I heard about the jack audio drivers... could anyone enlighten me as to are they better then alsa and why?

Thnx ,
Cheers.

[mpolo]

As to #1, supposedly you can put the proxy information into /etc/yum.conf. However, this does not seem to work for me (my latest experiment was only 15-20 minutes, so maybe I'm missing something). As a result, I am using apt, which handles proxies well, using a setting in the conf file.

As to #2, check your "Output plugin" under Preferences. ALSA should work well. Mine defaulted to something with lousy quality as well.

As to #3, the program timidity++ should do the trick. (Install via apt, yum, or off the install CDs.

[rakesh09]

well, yum was working if i exported the environment vars properly, so i guess i wil have to live with that.

#2 was fixed ; my soundcard uses the via-82xx.. had to enable dxs_support to get it working fine.

thanks for # 3... midi playing fine now.

thnx,
cheers