Linux

Mirror for Linux “sharp fonts” configuration

April 30, 2011 in Linux

The default font rendering in Linux distributions has always bothered me: so one of the first things I install on a new machine is the “Sharp fonts” configuration package to make the font rendering look more like Windows. However, I stumbled into a small problem when doing so today: the sharp fonts website domain seems to have expired.

Fortunately, I found a copy of the configuration files on one of my hard disks – download them here. Extract the files into /etc/fonts/ after installing the Microsoft TrueType fonts (ubuntu-restricted-extras, etc.), and log out to apply the changes. All done!

The world of desktop Linux

September 04, 2010 in Fedora, Linux

For a very long time I’ve been a user of Microsoft Windows – an operating system that needs no introduction. It’s not perfect, but it’s always worked great for me. But one day I decided to try something completely different: Linux.

Now, this wasn’t my first venture into Linux or anything – I administrate many servers running Linux and my netbook has probably seen every distribution in the world. In any case, after making some space on my hard disk, I decided to set up Arch Linux with the GNOME desktop environment (an Arch installation is bare-bones: there is no desktop environment or X server installed until you do it yourself). After I was done my computer was basically just like any other distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora: they all use GNOME by default.

And I really liked my new setup. After fighting with the graphics drivers for my ATI graphics card, everything ran pretty smoothly. My desktop’s aesthetics weren’t exactly on the level of Windows 7, but that did not concern me.

Of course, everything has problems. ATI drivers have never worked very well in Linux. OpenOffice isn’t really that great when compared to the latest versions of Microsoft Office. And of course, there aren’t many games for Linux – and WINE doesn’t really work that well with ATI’s drivers.

But I kept going. I used my Arch setup for months and even thought that I might never use Windows again.

One day in June I started thinking of trying out Fedora. Even though I was mostly satisfied with Arch Linux, the lack of support from proprietary apps (Adobe AIR, for example) and lack of software in the repositories started getting a bit annoying. In addition, I just thought that I’d feel more comfortable with something that comes with a desktop out of the box.

So I made more space on my hard disk. I ditched my old Windows install and backed up all files to another drive. I installed the latest version of Fedora – 13, and it was good. The biggest complaint I had was the yum package manager, which was slower than others like Arch’s pacman.

My desktop looked exactly the same as before: vanilla GNOME, with the exception of the Avant Window Navigator dock instead of the classic taskbar. And I used this setup for months.

Never say never

So I really liked desktop Linux and I wanted to stay with it. But the effects of the Kool-Aid started to wear off – things like the lack of some Windows applications started to annoy me. The rumors of Steam coming on Linux started to sound more and more unlikely. I started researching alternatives: what I liked the most in Linux was the *nix environment and the command line – could I get that in Windows?

There would always be Cygwin, but the lack of package management is a huge downside and it never felt right to me. So I got the idea of using a virtual machine – I installed Windows 7 and Debian squeeze in a tiny VM. I set it up so that I could SSH into it from Windows using PuTTY, and set up hard disk sharing from the host (Windows 7) to the VM.

And it seems to work pretty well. All my Ruby development happens inside a VM. Instead of using the Windows port of git, I use git through the virtual machine. Even all my SSH sessions go through the VM instead of using PuTTy directly – Xzibit would be proud!

I don’t think that I’ll be changing operating systems any time soon. But the logical next step would be OS X, right…?

Installing Ruby 1.9.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 with rvm

April 09, 2010 in Linux, Ruby

Being a big fan (and user) of the Ruby programming language, one of the first things I install on a new computer/OS is obviously the Ruby interpreter. However, on Ubuntu, some things are more difficult than usual. RubyGems doesn’t work as expected: new gems don’t go to the PATH. Thus, if I were to install Rails or nanoc using RubyGems, their executables wouldn’t work on the command line.

The Debian/Ubuntu way is to install these gems using their own package management. Personally I don’t think that this is such a good idea – the Ubuntu repositories obviously don’t have nearly every gem and if they do, it might not be up to date.

There are obviously many ways around this, and the simplest one is to add the RubyGems “binary” path to the user’s $PATH variable. However, this doesn’t change the fact that other Debian modifications still exist in the Ruby installation (for example, gem update --system is disabled.)

A nice solution is Ruby Version Manager, which is a simple command line application to manage different Ruby installations on the computer. RVM will compile the specified Ruby version for you and handle integrating it with your environment. And since it’s a version manager, switching from 1.8.x to 1.9.x to JRuby to whatever is also easy to do.

So, in order to install rvm, do the following:

bash << (curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head)

On-screen instructions will follow. Afterwards, let’s install Ruby 1.9.1. First we have to install some dependencies, though:

sudo apt-get install curl bison build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline5-dev libxml2-dev git-core

If you’re not using Ubuntu, there are dependency listings for other distributions in rvm’s website. As an example, the previous link goes to the Arch Linux page.

rvm install ruby-1.9.1

This will download the Ruby 1.9.1 source code and compile it. You could obviously replace ruby-1.9.1 with ruby-1.8.7 or ruby-head to get 1.8.7 and the cutting edge version. In any case, we’ll want to set our new installation as the user default:

rvm --default ruby-1.9.1

And now, we have a fully functioning Ruby 1.9.1 installation. Any new command line window will use that Ruby install by default. Now go build the next revolutionary web app or something!

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Ubuntu One is missing the point

September 05, 2009 in Linux

Ubuntu One is Canonical’s new service that lets you sync files and other data between your Ubuntu-powered computers.

And that’s great – now people with many computers can easily move data between them without the need to carry around USB flash keys: save a document at home and it’s automatically synchronized to your laptop at work!

But there’s a slight problem with this offering – the service is only available for computers running Ubuntu.

Why? People who use many computers probably also run many different operating systems. Mr. X could use Windows 7 on their desktop, and have Ubuntu on their netbook. Personally I use Windows and Arch Linux on my desktop and netbook – One is a no go for me.

Fortunately, there’s Dropbox, a similar service that gives away 2 gigabytes of space for free. They have a client for Windows, Linux, OS X, Android and a web UI. What else could you ask for?

(The above link is a referral link, but by registering through it we both get extra space, so go for it!)