tactical vim

I roll with Luxi Sans – that’s just the kind of guy I am. The font looks fantastic on LCD/laptop screens of varying dimensions (I use 1400×1050 on a Thinkpad T43, 1600×1200 on a Dell 2007FP, and 1900×1200 on a Dell XPS Gen 2) and to me is the best available. Luxi Mono as a console font is great. Sadly with the release of Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 the team removed the fonts from the distro due to licensing reasons (read about it here). See below for a quick and easy way to get it back on your system.

By a stroke of luck, the font was packaged in Fedora 8 in it’s own RPM file; additionally, that RPM is non-conflicting with newer releases – it installs cleanly. After you’ve got your system up and running just fire up Google and find this file:

xorg-x11-fonts-truetype-7.2-3.fc8.noarch.rpm

Since it was a mainstream part of Fedora 8, it’s available all over the internet. Download that RPM, install it and (if needed) restart XFS or however you like to get new fonts working. Done deal, you’re Luxi enabled and enjoying life.

For the paranoid, the contents of the package are listed here – no surprises. There is an install scriptlet and an uninstall scriptlet only, normal stuff.

postinstall scriptlet (using /bin/sh):
{
  FONTDIR=/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF
  ttmkfdir -d $FONTDIR -o $FONTDIR/fonts.scale
  mkfontdir $FONTDIR
  fc-cache $FONTDIR
}
postuninstall scriptlet (using /bin/sh):
{
  FONTDIR=/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF
  if [ "$1" = "0" -a -d $FONTDIR ]; then
    ttmkfdir -d $FONTDIR -o $FONTDIR/fonts.scale
    mkfontdir $FONTDIR
    fc-cache $FONTDIR
  fi
}


/etc/X11/fontpath.d
/etc/X11/fontpath.d/xorg-x11-fonts-TTF
/usr/share/X11/fonts
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/encodings.dir
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.alias
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-1
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-2
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-3
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-4
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-5
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-6
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-7
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-8
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.cache-9
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.dir
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/fonts.scale
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luximb.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luximbi.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luximr.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luximri.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxirb.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxirbi.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxirr.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxirri.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxisb.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxisbi.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxisr.ttf
/usr/share/X11/fonts/TTF/luxisri.ttf


Hooray, Luxi fonts! And there was much rejoicing.