My Two Cents

Probably the most popular Ubuntu blog in the world, apart from the official one, is Carthik Sharma’s. Carthik invited fellow bloggers to tell him whether they too blog about Ubuntu. The response is amazing. Nice to see that so many people are using FOSS operating systems.

Though I don’t write about Ubuntu that often in this blog anymore, one of my old posts always ranks the top post in this website! All my Ubuntu relates posts can be read here.

And finally, what is common between me and Carthik? We both are Tamilians!

I made a small update to the ever-popular post on this blog: OS X like font rendering in Linux.  The guide now covers Edgy too. Turner’s patches for Edgy are now available through a private repository. You can download it from here:

By the way, here is how my Edgy desktop looks now:

The icon theme is the ultra cool Echo from upcoming Fedora core 7 artwork. You can grab it from here. The GTK theme is clearlooks and the window manager is vanilla compiz.

I have been using Compiz with AIGLX for a while and thought I would checkout the Beryl project, which is a fork of compiz. So I added the Beryl repository to my sources list and installed all the associated Beryl software.

After I launched Beryl, I got a nice theme for my window manager. Though it looked good, I preferred the simple and cute title bar that came with original compiz. I fired the “Beryl Settings Manager” to see where I can change these settings. Voila! I was greeted with an application that had more options than anything I have ever seen before! Here is the sample:

You are only seeing a part of all the options available. Note the scrollbars – there are plenty of other settings for each plugin! Needless to say, most newbies will have no clue understanding what all these options mean.

Now I feel that it is good that the compiz project actually forked! I am sure an organization like Novell will not include anything like this into a mainstream desktop they sell to enterprises. While I can understand the enthusiasm of Beryl developers, it is sad to see that this project is now going in a direction where the software is heavily overdone and will not be of any use to anyone. At this point of time, most of the plugins are mere eye-candy and many a times more of an annoyance than anything useful. The default settings are ridiculous with those animated menus wobbling like hell.

Eye candy in conjunction with usability is what will click with the end user. Good example are Mac OS X and to an extent Vista. (I personally feel that Vista could have also done without some of those silly effects).

I promptly uninstalled Beryl and went back to vanilla compiz. Sorry developers.
(I later found out that the settings for Window Manager are changed through “Emerald Theme Manager”, which is another nicely overdone tool.)

My search for the best news reading application for Linux is over. After trying out several applications like Straw, Akregator etc., I finally settled on Liferea. Liferea is a GTK based application which is ideal for the gnome desktop. Though it does not have features like discovering multiple feeds within a website, emailing posts etc., it serves its purpose as a basic yet powerful news reader. The obligatory screen shot is below (click to enlarge).

To install just do:

sudo apt-get install liferea

Most of the time, just giving the URL of the website is enough to add a feed!

If you are using compiz with aiglx and recently did an apt-get dist-upgrade, you would have noticed that your gcompiz themer does not work any more. You can see a lot of new themes in the gcompiz themer and if you are wondering why those are’nt working, it is because those themes work only with cgwd and not gnome-window-decorator. To fix this, first take a backup of your compiz-start file in your /usr/bin folder. Then open the file in your favorite text editor in sudo mode and replace all instances of gnome-window-decorator with cgwd. Save the file and restart gnome. You are all set.

The following screenshot shows the nice looking theme called Vista-ish (click to enlarge).

Ok. Here is a fun new way to show your loyalty to Ubuntu. Just register and get your customized Ubuntu button with your user number on it. I am user number 220!

read more | digg story

Ok, I promise. This will be my last post on font rendering in Linux!

As usual, while tweaking some of the Linux font settings, I accidentally discovered that you can make X render fonts **exactly** as in OS X! (Don’t ask me how it works. I do not know. But it works perfectly!)
This is what I did:

• Removed all the existing font customizations that I have done earlier
• Made sure that I do not have a .fonts.conf in home directory.
• Made sure that only the default .conf files that shipped with Dapper are in /etc/fonts folder.
• Ensured that I have the Turners cleartype patch installed.(If you do not know how to apply patches or if you are too lazy to apply your own patch, grab the precompiled patched binaries from here.). Update: Ubuntu Edgy Eft users can get precompiled binaries with Turner’s patch here.
• Made sure that I have all the .ttf fonts from my Windows installation in Ubuntu too.
• Reconfigured fontconfig by running:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

On the first screen, I selected “None” and on the second and third screens I said no. Fontconfig will update your font settings and regenerate your font cache.

Turned on sub-pixel rendering in gnome font settings.

Restart X: ctrl+alt+backspace.

Here are some screenshots: (Tahoma never looked so better.)

Font preferences:

Apple website

Nautilus:

Digg home page:

This post as it was typed:

This blog post (Using wordpress preview. Look at Lucida Grande in all its glory!)

Update : Turns out that Mac uses “byte code interpretation” to achieve this font rendering. The fontconfig that we do in the above steps turns on BCI in freetype too. Hence the similar rendering effects. Because of this, you don’t need to install Turner’s patches – so ignore step 4.