Well, I'm a newbie to puppy, though I've been using and sometimes tweaking linux since the early days. I have to say puppy seems to hit a real sweet spot of simplicity, size and utility. Well done !
One thing that still isn't fixed in Linux, and in other unices, are fonts.
The first problem I find, is that compared to windows and mac, they just look horrible. Puppy is no exception, I'm afraid - the antialiasing just doesn't cut it at smaller font sizes, and even the glyph placement seems to go wrong with some faces.
As a quick hack, all I've done today is follow the instructions here :
http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html
To summarize, I've acquired a libfreetype.so ( eg from http://ftp.club-internet.fr/pub/linux/p ... f.i586.rpm ) library that has the byte-code interpreter enabled, for font hinting, I've turned off autohinting by default in fontconfig, and turned sub-pixel aliasing on (I'm on an LCD, though it still looks good on a CRT), and acquired a couple of truetype fonts - I copied verdana.ttf and tahome.ttf from /windows/fonts on a windows XP install, to /opt/TTF.
My /etc/fonts/local.conf is as follows:
Code: Select all
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file for local customizations -->
<fontconfig>
<dir>/opt/TTF</dir>
<match target="font">
<test qual="all" name="rgba">
<const>unknown</const>
</test>
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
</match>
<match target="font">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><const>False</const></edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
I've also changed mozilla's fonts to use verdana, or tahoma, and modified the menu fonts etc, defined in $HOME/.mozilla/...../userChrome.css.
The second prooblem with linux is the plethora of different font schemes used by different apps - a mess for the average user (or even administrator) to deal with. I haven't made much progress on this - it seems to me a config app is required that can tweak all the different systems automatically.
Anyway, for just a quick bit of hacking, at least some of my apps now look comparable to windows and mac - substantially better than the standard linux install. I haven't measure memory use, performance, etc - but my take is that making text highly readable, and looking good is more of a priority. Or at least an option.
Just one caution - as detailed in the howto above - this is not neccessarily stuff that can go in a distro, as there are licensing issues.
I might knock up a HOWTO when I have things a bit slicker though.[/quote]