赖洪礼的 blog
This is my personal blog. For Phusion's corporate blog, please go to http://blog.phusion.nl

Linux has supported antialiased fonts for quite some years now, but the default (antialiased) terminal fonts have always bothered me. By default, GNOME Terminal 2.x uses an antialiased Monospace or Fixed font:

I antialiasing makes terminals looks ugly. I much prefer the font as used by xterm, or GNOME Terminal 1.x. Back when Linux didn’t have good support for antialiased fonts, GNOME Terminal 1.x used a non-antialiased (bitmap) version of the Fixed font.

Luckily, I can use bitmap fonts in all fontconfig-enabled applications (which automatically includes all GTK and Qt applications). Although the “Fixed” font is antialiased now, the “MiscFixed” font is not - in fact it’s exactly the same as the old non-antialiased “Fixed” font. After using the MiscFixed font, by terminal now looks like this:

Not only does this look nicer, it also makes GNOME Terminal faster.

It’s quite a hassle to find this font. I don’t remember where I got this font from. So for my convenience, as well as for the convenience of the reader, I have attached the font to this blog post:
MiscFixed font - download here
Extract the contents to ~/.fonts, restart your terminal, and select “MiscFixed” as font in your terminal.

About two months ago I switched from Fedora 4 to Ubuntu 6.10. My scanner, an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo, worked fine on Fedora 4. Today I tried to scan something and I found out that it wouldn’t work on Ubuntu for some reason. usb-find-scanner could find my scanner just fine. scanimage -L also lists my scanner. But whenever I start xsane, I get the message

open of device snapscan:libusb:002:007 failed: Invalid argument

I already installed Epson Kowa’s iscan driver from source and it still wouldn’t work.

After some searching I found this site. I followed the instructions: I downloaded the iscan RPMs and converted them to DEB with alien. After installing the DEBs the scanner works! I had to remove libsane-extras though. That conflicts with the generated DEB files.

[EDIT] I also had to edit /etc/sane.d/dll.conf, and add ‘epkowa’ as entry.