Openbox

Links

No links submitted so far. Submit your own links.

News

Edit RSS feeds.

K Mandla: Rebuilding Dillo 0.8.6-i18n-misc

Posted 1 day ago

One thing I noticed when I was putting together the vaguely useful Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix was that Ubuntu’s Dillo, by default, enables antialiasing in fonts. You can see it in the screenshots of the desktop; Dillo’s fonts — and by that I mean the fonts in the rendered page, not the interface since those are [...]

Akkana Peck: Console Setup in Ubuntu

Posted 3 days ago

Dave and I were testing some ways of speeding up the booting process,
which is how he came to be looking at my Vaio's console with no X
running. "What's wrong with that font?" he asked.

I explained how Ubuntu always starts the boot ... [More] process with a perfectly
fine font, then about 80% of the way through boot it deliberately
changes it to a garbled, difficult to read that was clearly not
designed for 1024x761. Been meaning for ages to figure out how to
fix it, never spent the time ... Okay, it said "Setting up console
font and keymap" just before it changes the font.
That message should be easy to find.
Maybe I should take a few minutes now and look into it.

The message comes from /etc/init.d/console-setup,
which runs a program called setupcons, which has a
man page. setupcons uses /etc/default/console-setup
which includes the following section:

# Valid font faces are: VGA (sizes 8, 14 and 16), Terminus (sizes
# 12x6, 14, 16, 20x10, 24x12, 28x14 and 32x16), TerminusBold (sizes
# 14, 16, 20x10, 24x12, 28x14 and 32x16), TerminusBoldVGA (sizes 14
# and 16), Fixed (sizes 13, 14, 15, 16 and 18), Goha (sizes 12, 14 and
# 16), GohaClassic (sizes 12, 14 and 16).
FONTFACE="Fixed"
FONTSIZE="16"

The hard part of changing the console font in the past has always been
finding out what console fonts are available. So having a list right
there in the comment is a big help.
Okay, let's try changing it to Terminus and running setupcons again.
Nope, error message. How about VGA? Success, looks fine. That was easy!

But while I was in that file, what about the keymap? That's another
thing I've been meaning to fix for ages ... under Debian, Redhat and
earlier Ubuntu versions I had a .kmap.gz console map that turned my
capslock key into a Control key (the way God intended). But Ubuntu
changed things all around so the old fix didn't work any more.

I found a thread from
December from someone who wanted to make the exact same change,
for the same reason, but the only real advice in the thread involved
an elaborate ritual involving defining keymaps for X and Gnome then
applying them to the console. Surely there was a better way.

It seemed pretty clear that /etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz
was the keymap it was using. I tried substituting my old keymap, but
since I'd written it to inherit from other keymaps that no longer
existed, loadkeys can't use it. Eventually I just gunzipped
boottime.kmap.gz, found the Caps Lock key (keycode 29), replaced
all the Caps_Locks with Controls and gzipped
it back up again. And it worked!

Gary Vollink has a more detailed description, and the process hasn't
changed much since his page on
Getting "Control"
on the "Caps Lock".

Another gem linked to from the Ubuntu thread was this
excellent
article on keyboard layouts under X by Daniel Paul O'Donnell.
It's not relevant to the problem of setting the console keymap,
but it looks like a very useful reference on how various
international character input methods work under X. [Less]

Christopher W.: The BeBook eBook Reader is a great device

Posted 3 days ago

I enjoy reading books when ever I can and like many others, I had begun to bring them along with me in electronic form on my PDA so that I always had something to read.

My eBook reader for the past year or more has been my trusty Palm IIIxe ... [More] which was given a new lease on life thanks to great eBook reading software like Plucker and Weasel Reader.

However, There are obvious down-sides to reading eBooks on the IIIxe's small display and I decided that it was time to look around for a dedicated eBook reader. I wanted something that was not loaded with DRM, had support for a wide variety of formats, and looked reasonably decent.

read more [Less]

K Mandla: Updated and upgraded

Posted 3 days ago

I have reposted the Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix ISO, this time with a lot of upgrades and a better, more complete software selection. Take a look at the remix page, and see if you care to try it once more.
The main additions are Beaver, XPaint, Ghostview and a slew of X-based application(let)s — mostly tools that [...]

Miklos Bacso: Inside My Head: photos at funerals

Posted 4 days ago

I was asked by Owen's grandpa to take some photos at his funeral. Let me tell you, this is not an easy task.

Read all Openbox articles…