codeblog code is freedom — patching my itch

June 27, 2008

another gnome easter egg

Filed under: Blogging,Ubuntu — kees @ 4:59 pm

While I had tried the Alt-F2 “gegls from outer space” easter egg, I’d never done the “free the fish” one. It was fun, but while looking around for how to disable it (“killall gnome-panel” — there is no programmatic way to stop the fish), I found another egg that I don’t think any one has mentioned before. It re-uses the goat from the gegls game:

  1. Right-click an open panel area
  2. Select “properties”
  3. Right-click on a notebook tab 3 times

© 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

June 22, 2008

bold fonts in libvte (gnome-terminal, terminator)

Filed under: Ubuntu — kees @ 11:22 am

A while back I complained about terminal fonts. In the end, I was shown that the real source of my pain was a 7 year old gnome bug where vte did not attempt to use bold fonts and always used double-strike instead. For me, this was a show-stopper given my desire for using tiny bitmap fonts for my terminals. Double-strike bolding made things unreadable.

I finally had a solid chunk of time to dedicate to working on the plumbing needed for vte to support bold fonts sanely. (I’ve attached all my patches to the bug linked above.) I’m really quite happy — I can finally stop using “xterm” everywhere and fully switch to gnome-terminal and terminator for all their UTF8 goodness. Now I just need to tweak gnome-terminal’s colors — things seem slightly washed out.

For anyone else interested in using bitmap fonts in gnome-terminal, here is the final recipe (since digging through all the comments in the original blog post doesn’t make it entirely obvious):

$ mkdir -p ~/.fonts
$ cp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/7x14{,B}.pcf.gz ~/.fonts
$ cat > ~/.fonts.conf <<EOM
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>

  <!-- /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/7x14{,B}.pcf.gz copied to ~/.fonts/ -->
  <selectfont>
    <acceptfont>
      <pattern>
        <patelt name="family"><string>fixed</string></patelt>
        <patelt name="pixelsize"><int>14</int></patelt>
      </pattern>
    </acceptfont>
  </selectfont>

</fontconfig>
EOM

At this point, you can verify that fontconfig sees your bitmap fonts:

$ fc-list | grep Fixed
Fixed:style=Bold
Fixed:style=Regular

Now just close all your gnome-terminals to get vte to reload the new fonts, and configure it to use the newly available font:

$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/font -t string "Fixed 14"
$ gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/use_system_font -t bool false

Ta-da!

© 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

June 18, 2008

Linux Plumbers Conference 2008

Filed under: Blogging,kernel.org,Ubuntu — kees @ 10:17 am

The Call for Speakers (and registration) for the Linux Plumbers Conference is open! Get those proposals in, register, and come join us in sunny Portland, OR.

The Linux Plumbers Conference was created to bring together the key developers involved in Linux plumbing – the “Linux plumbers” – and give them an opportunity to discuss problems face-to-face, both within subsystems and across subsystems. Participants include invited attendees, speakers selected through an open, competitive review process, and students. Registration is open to the general public as well.
…
The goal of the Plumbers Conference is to solve problems. The conference is arranged as a series of microconferences, each on a topic that is narrow enough to identify specific problem areas and brainstorm workable solutions. Each microconference is led by an expert in the field and organized to encourage discussion and problem solving.

© 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

June 12, 2008

zombie meme

Filed under: Blogging,Ubuntu — kees @ 10:45 pm

Tollef posted a fun (and short) Zombie mem:

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

  1. One weapon
  2. One song blasting on the speakers
  3. One famous person to fight along side you.

I can’t resist.

  1. BFG9000: ranged weapon that vaporizes multiple zombies at once. I should be out of the mall before I’m out of ammo.
  2. “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys: up beat and a little silly.
  3. Jet Li: he could totally handle the zombies within slicing/kicking/clubbing range.

© 2008, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
CC BY-SA 4.0

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