Better fonts in Ubuntu - full stop

Now I'm the first to admit I dont have the best eye sight in the world, but ever since i started using ubuntu and even going back to the days I was using fedora even I've noticed that the fonts in Gnome have always been "fuzzier" and looked worse then similiar sized fonts in windows XP. This has been very clear on my laptop where LCD subpixel rendering makes a difference.

Today I finally got really sick of them and despite all the posts on various blogs and forums going on about how its just peoples imaginations and fonts on Ubuntu/linux/gnoe really do look better then winXP or that its just a matter of twiddling with the Gnome font settings I just went ahead and installed 3 packages based on some recent pathces to the releavant libaries. I found the deb packages here
and thanks to this very nice person my fonts finally look decent in ubuntu (gnome). At last!

Now I just need to figure out how to make patched debs based on ubuntu's latest sources since the update manager now keeps trying to replace the versions I just installed with "newer" packages which of course don't have the patches and rtunr my destop to it former ugliness.

a dapper world

well now that dapper has gone final (aka Ubuntu version 6.06 has been released) I've installed it on my laptop. Unfortunately I've been too busy to test the beta's or 'flight' versions hat have been released during it development cycle so I have only myself to blame that I need to use the following work around to get suspend working (found on this blog entry):

One thing about sleep: vbetool needs to save and restore your video state in order to have working video on resume. Currently, on Macbooks this is broken. This is caused by a mistake: the vbesave init script comes before the acpi init script. This means that laptop-detect will report to vbesave that you are not on a laptop and vbesave will not save your vbestate. Matthew Garrett is working on a fix, but in the mean time a workaround is to edit /usr/sbin/laptop-detect and insert a line 'exit 0' right after the #!/bin/sh (always report that we're a laptop).

Not pretty, but since I'm pretty sure my laptop should infact be running inlaptop mode, I think its ok for now.

also to get my funky special acer keys to work (especially the little flashing "you've got mail" light) I needed to do the following:
$ sudo -s
# echo "acerhk" >> /etc/modules
# exit

Well, at least its supposed too. My keys work, but no flashing light yet...

[Update] Bah, dont know whta happened at first, but a reboot later and my you-have-mail blinken light is going strong once more.
Now I just need to figure out how to get my new rt2500 wifi card working with NetworkManager, but thats a story for another day...