Re: newbie's UI problems

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 22:43, Shot wrote:
> Hello.

Hi.

> 
> // This is a repost from the debian-user mailing list; nobody
> // answered me there, so I thought I'll try here instead.
> 
> I have a couple of questions regarding the GNOME UI (I'm running Debian
> unstable; not fully grasping the whole desktop manager/window manager
> thing yet, but I belive it's Metacity here):

Unless you did something special, your window manager will be Metacity.
You can test this by running 'pgrep metacity' and if it returns a
number, that is the process ID of the running metacity process.

> 
> 1. Is there a way to tell GNOME not to antialias fonts in a certain
> range of sizes? Currently I have to resort to KDE's kcontrol to turn the
> antialiasing off in the 6-12 pt range... [After some googling I've found
> out I should ry editing /etc/fonts/local.conf - is this the right path?]

Your searching is leading you in the right direction. Have a look in
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf to see the current configuration. You can override
things from this file by putting them in /etc/fonts/local.conf (note
that you should never edit fonts.conf directly, since that will be
overridden when you next upgrade fontconfig).

To control the anti-aliasing, have a look at, for example, the rules in
fonts.conf used to control when the Vera font should stop being
anti-aliased:

        <match target="font">
                <test name="family">
                        <string>Bitstream Vera Sans</string>
                </test>
                <test name="pixelsize" compare="less">
                        <double>7.5</double>
                </test>
                <edit name="hinting">
                        <bool>false</bool>
                </edit>
        </match>

I believe this is reasonably self-explanatory (a series of tests,
followed by the edit action to take if all of the tests are passed). So
it sounds like you might want a block in local.conf that is similar to
the above, but without the first test.


> 2. Importing full GTK2 themes works (at least I managed to get the
> Glossy P[1] theme simply by downloading it and clicking "install theme"
> in the theme manager), but I don't know how to install an icon set. I'd
> like to have the Tux 'n' Tosh[2] icons, but clicking "install theme"
> doesn't seem to work in this case (clicking it and pointing to the Tux
> 'n' Tosh archive somehow removed the Industrial icon set, though).

Since I officially have the world's most boring desktop, I shall leave
this up to somebody who has used the theming stuff in more than just a
trivial fashion.

> 3. How can I change the window title font? This option is grayed
> out in the font settings (but I think it wasn't when I executed
> gnome-font-properties from KDE).

Hmm. Not grayed out for me (but I'm not using Debian), so I cannot help
you here. I have a vague memory that at one point I could not change
this setting, but I cannot remember what happened to fix that and my
brain would like me to go to sleep now, so it is not helping.

> 4. Is there a way to use the "fixed" font in gnome-terminal? The font
> dialog doesn't show it, as it's not a TrueType font, but I got used to
> Eterm's -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-2
> very much...

You can only use fonts that are managed by fontconfig. The old X bitmap
fonts cannot be used any longer. So, unfortunately, you will need to
find a TrueType-like font that meets your requirements.

So, some good news, some bad news and some stuff I don't know. Hopefully
others will fill in the missing pieces.

Cheers,
Malcolm