Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 4, Related to X

#25 Use Windows and Mac Fonts

HACK

directories so that you’ll copy everything below the CoolGear and default

directories to the destination ~/.icons):

$ cp –R CoolGear ~/.icons

$ cp –R default ~/.icons

The second command overwrites whatever index.theme file you have in your

~/.icons/default directory.

Start up your favorite desktop or window manager (or exit and restart the

desktop or window manager you’re using), and you should see the cursor

theme, formerly designed for Windows, running on your Linux X server-

based desktop!

Not every CursorXP theme converts well. It’s possible for a

misbehaving cursor theme to prevent you from starting up

your window manager or desktop. If you have this problem,

switch to a virtual console by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1. Log in with

your normal username. Edit your ~/.icons/default/index.theme

file, and change the

Inherits parameter to a theme that

works.

HACK

#25

Use Windows and Mac Fonts Hack #25

Spruce up your desktop with your favorite fonts from other operating

systems.

A major problem that has been leveled at the Linux desktop is a lack of

good-quality fonts. This is because font creation is a time-consuming and

expensive process that requires a lot of skill. Those who know how to do it

are generally not inclined to give their work away for free (a nice contrast to

the thousands of open source programmers who do give their code away).

You can purchase fonts to use with your Linux system, but it is cheaper to

use fonts you already have on another OS.

When copying fonts from one operating system to another,

bear in mind the legal implications of what you are doing.

Fonts that are included with proprietary operating systems

are sometimes under specific licensing terms that can restrict

their use. Before you copy anything, be sure to read the

licensing terms for the fonts.

Use Windows Fonts

Linux has full support for the TrueType fonts used by Windows. One

method of using the fonts is to simply copy them from Windows and install

them either in the X font directories or in .fonts in your home directory.

Use Windows and Mac Fonts #25

Chapter 4, Related to X

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Although this method works, if you have Windows installed on the same

computer that runs Linux, it’s unnecessary to copy all those fonts when you

can use a more elegant solution and access them from one place.

First, you need to ensure that you can mount your Windows partition. To

do this you need to have support for the VFAT (or NTFS if you use Win-

dows 2000/XP) filesystem in your kernel. My distribution kernels include

this support, but if you compile your own kernels, you need to add support

yourself. In your kernel configuration tool, enable support by selecting File

systems

➝ DOS/FAT/NT, File systems ➝ VFAT Support or, if you have an

NTFS filesystem, File systems

➝ NTFS file system support (read only).

Before you can access the Windows disk, mount the partition. You can do

this manually with the following:

foo@bar:~$ mkdir /mnt/windows

foo@bar:~$ mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

Your Windows partition might be located someplace other than /dev/hda1

and you can use a different mount point than /mnt/windows. If you are

unsure which partition numbers are available, you can type this command

to see a list:

foo@bar:~$ ls -al /dev/hda*

To make mounting easier, add this mount point to the list of available

mount points in /etc/fstab. This file tells the system which disks are available

and how they are accessed. You should add one of these two lines depend-

ing on whether you have a VFAT- or NTFS-formatted Windows partition:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat rw 0 0

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs ro 0 0

This tells the system that /dev/hda1 is available in /mnt/windows with read

and write access and to mount it at every boot. NTFS is mounted read-only

(

ro), because writing to an NTFS partition is not supported and will cause

data corruption.

To use the fonts, you need to access the Windows font directory and run

some utilities that will make the fonts usable in X Windows. Although X sup-

ports TrueType fonts, it needs some special files to be generated that provide

information about the fonts. Windows often keeps fonts in C:\Windows\Fonts,

so you should go to /mnt/windows/windows/fonts to run the commands.

The first command is called

ttmkfdir. This command creates a special font

information file called fonts.scale that displays a list of the fonts and their

capabilities in a format the X server can understand; this acts like a refer-

ence card that says what each font can do. To create this file, simply run the

command inside the font directory:

foo@bar:~$ ttmkfdir