When it comes to typography, Microsoft TrueType fonts are both visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing. They’re found all over the web, usually specified in stylesheets. Unfortunately for Linux users, the most common TTFs aren’t installed (by default, that is). Instead, they are replaced by generic equivalents. With these font packages installed, you will see websites as the designer intended.

The Microsoft TrueType fonts package includes:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

Installing MS TrueType fonts in Ubuntu

You can install the MS core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package. You will need to enable the “Universe” component of the repositories (done by default in Feisty & Hardy). After that, run the following from the command line:

While this gives you the core fonts, it also gives you the ability to install any other font by simply copying the .TTF to the ~/.fonts/ directory.

When installing new fonts, you’ll need to re-login to be able to see & use them. Optionally, this step can be bypassed by regenerating the fonts cache with:

Installing MS TrueType fonts in Fedora

Yep, a few extra steps in Fedora, but still a cinch. From the shell:

That should do it. Reinitialize the font cache, re-login or reboot and have another look at this site (with Georgia).

Fedora 9 was released this past Tuesday. The upgrade process has changed slightly, with the Fedora Project integrating a new tool called PreUpgrade.

To upgrade, make sure your system is fully updated with:

and reboot when the process has completed successfully (in case it installed a new kernel).

From here, we can install the new PreUpgrade with:

When that finishes, kick it off with:

As we proceed through the wizard, your screens will resemble:

Click Forward.

The new release will be chosen by default. Click Apply.

At this point, new packages are downloaded which may take some time. Grab some coffee while the downloads transfer.

Finished! Reboot and we will see a screen like this:

The remaining portion of the upgrade will be completed by Anaconda, which took approximately 5 hours on my system. Proceed by clicking Next.

“Upgrade an existing installation” is preselected, hit Next to continue.

Here you are prompted to upgrade the GRUB boot loader. This is the best thing to do. Click Next. The following series of screens are shown as the upgrade progresses:

Ah, here we are. We find ourselves at the final screen, indicating the success of the upgrade. Word. Reboot. And that should conclude the process.

In my opinion, this upgrade was 1000x better than the upgrade from F7 to F8. I ran into all kinds of issues then, but this was better.

Having gone through the steps now, what was your upgrade experience like?

Some may find that out-of-the-box, Hardy Heron’s network performance is painfully slow. By default, IPv6 is enabled, and chances are good that your nearest router can’t speak the language nor interpret DNS requests efficiently.

To disable IPv6, open a shell and append the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

Reboot.

To verify that IPv6 is disabled, run

or

The commands shouldn’t return any information. Firefox browsing speeds should be much improved.

Run once, huh? Good work, Microsoft. Way to throw more wood on the ‘annoying’ fire.

Manually add these keys:

Or execute this registry file to keep it from running indefinitely.

In the past, we discussed the procedure for upgrading Fedora using yum. Ready to try it again for Werewolf?

Grab the new fedora-release and fedora-release-notes to update repos:

Now sit back, relax, and run yum -y upgrade for a couple of hours.

Actually, there was nothing relaxing about it. Yum repeatedly killed itself during the transaction test. If that happens, you might try upgrading sqlite (that’s yum -y upgrade sqlite) before all other packages.

Then I started getting memory alloc errors. I don’t exactly know how I ran out of memory, but I closed my VNC session and tried again through a remote shell. If that doesn’t work, try upgrading bits and pieces instead of everything at once. For example, upgrade perl, then rpm, then python, etc.

I also ran into problems with mismatched checksums. I didn’t want to re-download every last package AGAIN, so I removed pretty much everything in /var/cache/yum except for downloaded packages, and that took care of it. Another way: yum clean dbcache. Oh, and make sure you have a backup of your data first.

Eventually it installed 80 packages, updated 880, and removed 4. (Download size: 776 M)

Since the previous upgrade, I’ve reduced unnecessary packages, but the entire thing still sucked a lot compared to Ubuntu’s upgrade to 7.10.

If you attempted this upgrade, how did it go? Did you run into as many problems?