Re: I don't get gnome 2

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Rob Brown-Bayliss <rob zoism org> writes:
> 
> Firstly the much hyped AA fonts.  Where, I select the fonts panel there
> is no option to turn it on, and why is it off by default?  Well, I set
> GDK_USE_XFT and now I know why, half the fonts disappear and the ones
> that are left look worse than a non AA truetype font.  Whats going on
> here?  And why cant the AA thing by turned on using the gconf editor?
>

The fonts thing is really going to require distributions/packagers to
get it right for their particular font setup. We're doing this for Red
Hat now. It's a lot of work.

For individuals, the best suggestion is to download/install the
Microsoft fonts. 

The reason this is an env variable and not a setting is because
GDK_USE_XFT does not toggle AA or not. It toggles whether to use the
new modern font backend, or the old deprecated core X font backend.
i.e. this is modifying an implementation detail.  It will be on by
default and not an option at all eventually. You can then control
which fonts are available, and whether to AA them at what sizes, and
many other things, using /etc/fonts/fonts.conf (or for the moment
/etc/X11/XftConfig). The reason core X fonts are the default right now
is that Xft1 requires X server extensions, and has some issues.

The reason you lose fonts when enabling AA is that you are now using
the fonts that are configured for Xft, not those configured for core X
fonts, and your distribution has different fonts for those.

Xft1 (used for now) does not support using the PCF format fonts that
come with X, but Xft2 (used in Red Hat rawhide and CVS HEAD version of
Pango) does support those fonts.

Xft2 also no longer requires an X server extension.

So short answer, Xft2 removes the limitations of Xft1 allowing us to
simply turn it on always.
 
> Gnome 2 feels like it needs a few more months work.

Well, as someone who professionally packages things ;-) I think at
least in part what you're seeing is the lack of professional
packaging.

Not entirely though, it's quite true that 2.2 (in 6 months) will be
what many people probably wanted out of 2.0. But releasing 2.0 is the
only way to get there.

You can get a (possible) preview of 2.2 by using some of the more
experimental stuff such as VTE, Metacity, etc.

Havoc