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Solaris Fonts on Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the porting-X-fonts dept.

IOstream asks: "I was wondering if anyone has a way to get all of the Solaris fonts into XFree86 on Linux, or at least something similar... I am wondering for two reasons: 1) their fonts seem much cleaner, and Linux apps look better exported to Solaris as a result, 2) there are some sun apps which are dependant on Suns fonts, and the display will not export properly... "

1 of 9 comments (clear)

  1. How about XFS? by Fandango · · Score: 2
    The easiest way to export fonts from a Solaris machine (or any box running X) is to install the X Font Server (on Solaris, this is the SUNWxwfs package).

    Solaris includes a utility called fsadmin which you can use to add the appropriate line to /etc/inetd.conf to start the font server when someone connects to it.

    Now, to configure your Linux box to access the Solaris font server, add something like "tcp/hostname:7100" to the FontPath line in your XF86Config file.

    If you'd rather not use the font server, another, more complicated, option is to duplicate the CDE font aliases on your Linux system. The reason CDE programs look strange when run on your Linux system is that they look for font names starting with "-dt-", which CDE installs as aliases to regular X fonts. Try this to see a list:

    grep -- -dt- /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/*/fonts.*

    Now, make sure your Linux configuration has the fonts installed that the alias lines refer to (if not, look up the font filenames in fonts.dir and copy them to the Linux box), then add the alias lines to your fonts.alias files on the Linux side. Do an xset fp rehash and you should see the new fonts in an xlsfonts listing.

    You'll need to have some knowledge of the fonts.alias and fonts.dir files in order to figure out how to implement this second approach, but I have done it before, so I know it's possible. Each line in fonts.alias maps a font alias to a real font name. Each line in fonts.dir maps a filename on disk to its font name. Solaris includes some proprietary scaled fonts in the F3 directory that XFree86 doesn't support, but there seem to be bitmap versions in the F3bitmaps directory (as of Solaris 2.6 at least), and the CDE aliases refer to those so you should be okay.

    Good luck!

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    Jake