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Getting Bitmapped Fonts in Ubuntu 10.04.1

Ubuntu Tux

I had a few development boxes restaged from CentOS 5 to Ubuntu 10.04.1 as The Shop is moving away from CentOS and to Ubuntu. As it turns out, the code I've been working on has pointed out a bug in the kernel that ships with CentOS 5 related to a lot of very fast malloc and free cycles. But that's not the point. On Ubuntu, I wanted to get the bitmapped font Misc Fixed Semicondensed, and by default, it's not allowed.

But that's only the default. Here's how to enable it.

The key is to remove the font config rule that says "no bitmapped fonts". To do this, we simply:

  $ sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf

this was a link to /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf anyway, so it's not like anything was really "lost". Then we need to re-run the font config to pick up this change:

  $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Now you should have bitmapped fonts for Vim. Excellent.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 14th, 2011 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Open Source Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.