Crisp Fonts on Linux

December 18th, 2008

fontsWell I just installed Linux Mint tonight as I really liked where the Project was going, it’s basically Ubuntu with some extra’s for the real Linux geeks.

The only problem with any (or most) new Linux installations is that the fonts are blurry and spacing is just off.. So I did some googling and found this thread on the Ubuntu forums, if you follow the 2 simple steps given you’re fonts will look a lot better..

Create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory (vim ~/.fonts.conf) and paste in the following contents

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

After that relog.

Apperantly the reason this isn’t done by default is because Apple has some patents on the techniques used to make this happen.. don’t you just hate patents..

Note that I’ve only tried it on Linux Mint 6 (based on Ubuntu 8.10), but I reckon it should work for most distro’s.. gonna try it tomorrow on Centos 4.7 at work.

Mounting SSH / FTP for Easy Access

November 15th, 2008

folder-remoteHaving discovered the “remote files” feature in Komodo Edit I went on a search for methods to access remote projects through Komodo (as oppose to just one or two files).

Using Ubuntu I came to the solution of using SSHFS, it took me a while to find a good tutorial on how to auto-mount using this protocol, but in the end I found a blog by Colin M from The Spark Between  on how to auto-mount sshfs on Ubuntu..

Since my wife uses Windows and I don’t feel comfortable giving her SSH access I searched a bit further and found that there is a build-in feature in Windows that will let you mount an FTP server as a network share.

Hope this info can help other people looking for similair solutions :)

Installing Pidgin Plugin Pack on Intrepid

November 11th, 2008

logopidginHaving had some issues with the current version of the Pidgin Plugin Pack available from the Ubuntu repositories I decided to give the latest source a try.

I ran into the following error while trying to get do the make


switchspell.c:43:31: error: gtkspell/gtkspell.h: No such file or directory
switchspell.c: In function ‘menu_conv_use_dict_cb’:
switchspell.c:77: error: ‘GtkSpell’ undeclared (first use in this function)
switchspell.c:77: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
switchspell.c:77: error: for each function it appears in.)
switchspell.c:77: error: ‘spell’ undeclared (first use in this function)
switchspell.c:87: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘gtkspell_get_from_text_view’
switchspell.c:89: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘gtkspell_set_language’
make[2]: *** [switchspell.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/nathan/Downloads/purple-plugin_pack-2.4.0/switchspell’
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/nathan/Downloads/purple-plugin_pack-2.4.0′
make: *** [all] Error 2

The solution is quite simple, make sure you have libgtkspell0 and libgtkspell-dev installed and then execute the following commands


sudo mkdir /usr/include/pidgin/gtkspell
sudo ln -s /usr/include/gtkspell-2.0/gtkspell/gtkspell.h /usr/include/pidgin/gtkspell/gtkspell.h

Now the make should finnish properly (assuming you have all the required deps installed).