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.

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

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).