I recently picked up "Firefly, The Complete Series", and would like to enjoy viewing it on my newly recycled laptop. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2650, with a copy of the KDE Live version of Fedora installed on the harddrive. I'm doing my best to add capabilities in a GUI manner, even though I personally much prefer a terminal window and a command prompt.
Placing a Firefly DVD in the drive, after a moment, the 'what do you want me to do with this?' window popped up. Fedora Live KDE version installs player Kaffeine, so I'm going to be working with Kaffeine. I pick play with Kaffeine, a short banner appears, and then Kaffeine dies, being unable to read the DVD. No shiny yet.
The first place I want to go for this fix, and probably several future fixes, is the Livna RPM Repository. Point a browser at rpm.livna.org, look for the Fedora 8 repository rpm link half way down the page, and click on it. When the livna repo is installed in /etc/yum.repos.d, yum then has access to the Fedora RPMs that Redhat and Fedora won't supply through their rpm channels.
If you haven't already installed YumEx, the GUI frontend to Yum, I highly recommend doing so. Pick your favorite Fedora mirror site, for example Duke University, scroll down to the yumex rpm, and click to launch the installer. Once YumEx is installed, you can find it at the bottom of the "System" menu, or use Alt-F2 to call up the run command box, and enter "yumex". You'll need the root password to run YumEx.
When YumEx is loaded, click the Repo View icon, it's second from the bottom, on the left, to make sure Livna Base is selected. Then select the Package View icon, the open box, top icon on the left. Select the 'Available' radio button, and then enter 'libdvdcss' in the search box. Check the box for 'libdvdcss', and then click the 'Process Queue button in the lower right to install the rpm.
Now when I right click on the Firefly DVD icon, and select "Play DVD with Kaffeine, I get more than just the FBI copy warning, I get to see an episode of Firefly. Now that's shiny. All is right in the 'Verse.
[Edit] One other thing I needed to do was add my normal user id to the "disk" group. You can accomplish this with an Alt-F2 to get the Run Command dialog, and entering system-config-users. After entering the root password, edit the properties on your user id, then click on the 'groups' tab. Check off 'disk' to add yourself to the disk group. Now you should be able to access the dvd drive.
