can't get multimedia working with any browser

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel shellworld net>]

Having downloaded and installed mailcap-stuff.tar.gz I first tried 
listening to a realplayer stream using lynx.  No go, display wasn't set. 
Okay no problem I figure I can go into xwindows and use gnopernicus and 
maybe firefox or epiphany.  Maybe one of those browsers will work but 
hitting the f7 key to try to get some screen output seems on this system 
to actually be the crash gnopernicus immediately key.  I could understand 
the desire of gnopernicus to do a high dive if all that was on this system 
was 128MB of ram which was the case earlier this week.  However there's 
now 416MB of ram available in lower memory and this is happening.  This is 
a fedora core 3 installation that has been modified for multimedia via the 
extra yum repositories.  The network was opened with ifup ppp0 before 
startx ever ran.  So what prerequisite configuration of gnome did I most 
likely neglect?