Ninth order of business

Here's a new goal to list. Unfortunately it is low on the totem pole at the moment. (Thus the "Ninth order of business" title.)

I'm going to design a Blogger template especially for Slackware Noob. Whoo! And I'll do it entirely in Linux (no cheating!! I promise!) and I can be proud of whatever I end up with. Yep... that totally came to me out of nowhere, as I was looking at the very blah, stock design that is currently Slackware Noob.

That must change.

Pretty fonts

In my goals to develop and design primarily out of linux, I decided to see what installing fonts was like in Slackware. Like everything else, it's really hard until you figure something out that works! The joys of linux!

The super duper easy way I discovered is to use the KDE window manager font installation feature. I tried a number of other things (some of which REALLY messed things up... I won't expand on those tonight.) but here is what worked and my primary source of usefulness on the issue. http://penguinfonts.com/howto/slackware.php

First off, you can choose to follow step #3 to install the standard MS Windows fonts if you want 'em. Then (for me, anyway) I had to add in another series of steps. From the command line I had to run:

mkfontscale
mkfontdir
fc-cache -f -v
xset fp rehash


FIRST.... if you're like me, these apps won't be runnable without putting the full path in front. For me I had to "whereis" every one (the first "word" of each command) to figure out where they actually lived. Then it was smooth sailing. I exited X (if I was in it) and started it up again. The newly installed fonts magically appeared in apps like The GIMP and Inkscape. Whoo!

I have a TON of fonts that I've collected and used in Windows so just to make life easy enough for now, I wanted to install the same fonts that I currently have installed. I have my C: drive mapped to /c-drive (this happened magically on Slackware setup... I must have done something right!!!) and my fonts are under /c-drive/Windows/fonts. I just copied them all to a more local location. (It ended up being /usr/local/share/ttf due to some earlier font installation attempts that didn't quite work out.) What worked for me was (as already mentioned) going into KDE (instead of Freerock Gnome, in my case) and following PenguinFonts step #1a, heading into the Control Center.

To make this work all the way, I had to go into Administration Mode (root password required) and then add fonts, selecting all the ready-to-be-added fonts. After that operation was successful, I again had to follow those four steps (as discussed above) and then restart X. Amazingly (after much pain in the process) it worked.

Now.... all I want to know is, if I install ALLLLLL my fonts (including the many that I do not have load up on start up in Windows) ... will that slow down Slackware? Is the startup affected similarly?? Hmmmm....

(P.S. I do not like xdm. I accidently take myself into it, when I'm really looking for xwmconfig. Argh. I can never get completely out of xdm without a total restart. ARGH!!)

Beautiful! I can SEE!

Today, I set out to figure out how to make X Windows deliver a higher resolution, so I can take advantage of my nice 19" LCD monitor.

I started off by downloaded the latest version of XFree86 which can be downloaded from The XFree86 Project site. The most up to date stable version is 4.6.0 and that's what I downloaded. I followed the instructions, checking there was a suitable version available, backing things up myself, etc. and everything seemed to go relatively smoothly.

The configuration wasn't so easy for me for some reason. It wasn't all horrible or anything but the wizards just weren't helping to make the difference I was looking for. Things were all fuzzy at X-Windows startup but would sort of re-adjust. This first good thing I noticed is that it was dispaying things at my monitor's maximum resolution of 1280x1024. But it was doing so off-centre, as well as that fuzzy issue at startup and the occasional weird blip. This just would not do.

I looked around online a bit and ended up downloading the NVIDIA driver for my particular video card. I had already been messing around in the XFreeConfig file (which I learned is eerily similar to the xorg.conf file that I used to edit, but learned that only one or the other gets used by the X-server. With this new XFree install, all the edits had to be made to the XFreeConfig file instead *sigh*) and had already adjusted my monitor's horizontal and vertical sync rates as listed in the manual. And after downloading and installing the NVIDIA driver -- which went smoothly -- the configuration stuff -- once again -- didn't really work for me..... actually I think it altered the wrong config file which really does not make things work. So I ended up manually editing the XFreeConfig file again... but I had some help in this one.

One little hitch that might be specifically worthwhile mentioning, in editing the XFreeConfig file to use the NVIDIA driver (instead of a generic or open source version) I made the -- possibly pointless -- decision to change the identifier of the driver, since it wasn't generic anymore. I quickly learned that the graphics device identifier is referenced later on in the file under the Screen section, so I made it all confused when I made that change. The fix was easy though, I just had to change the identifier in the Screen section of the file as well. (Or could have just left all the identifiers alone and not been so picky!)

Once I fired X-Windows up again, everything seems great!! :) No fuzzy startup. Still the good resolution. No weird flickering. Everything is back on centre. I'll take it. It's beautiful.

And it's interesting to note that the NVIDIA driver will support 2D and 3D stuff... not that I'll mess with that too much, but it just sounds cool. :)