One of the serious put-offs of linux is you can’t get anything running the first time. My touchpad wasn’t working the first time around. And don’t expect media to play as well! I have Fedora 8 installed and it has totem installed as the default media player. As expected, it wasn’t playing anything. I could have individually installed the codecs, but I didn’t want to take the trouble of scouting for codecs. By the way, some codecs are proprietary so there again you hit a roadblock. So, the only option left was to look for a third party repository. nubs on #fedora.freenode.net virtually ran me through the installation. Here’s how I did it:
1) Installed and activated the livna repository( Had to do it, because fedora repos do not have free codecs for some formats).
rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
2) Removed the existing player to make way for the version with additional support.
yum remove totem totem-plparser
3) Cleaned the yum cache.
yum clean all
4) Installed the player and all the other codecs required in one go!
yum install totem-xine xine-lib-extras xine-lib-extras-nonfree
I was done with it in four simple steps. There I was from “will totem ever play anything” to “is there anything totem won’t play?” Well, 
there are still some formats it doesn’t play like realmedia and a couple of others, but generally speaking it now plays almost everything under the sun!!
