Every so often I find a new font that I want to use for something on my system.

This time it was a new programming font in gvim. The font I was interested in is ProFontI use this font at work, and it is far superior to the default terminal font.

But ever time I go to install a new font, I need to look up how. It’s one of those things that I don’t do often enough for it to be worth remembering I guess.

So here it is, for my reference… Ok, you can read it too I suppose.

This applies to truetype fonts but, as far as I am aware, the process should be similar, if not the same, for other font types.

The first step is to obtain the font files and place them into one of your system font folders.

Your font folders can be found by:

grep FontPath /etc/X11/xorg.conf


I decided to use /usr/share/fonts/truetype/custom/ so after copying the .ttf file(s) into there.

sudo cp newfont.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/custom/


It was a simple matter of running:

sudo fc-cache -f

to update the fonts and they were available to use where I wanted them (in Vim).

My SSL certificate for my mail server had been expired for a few weeks now. When I finally got a round to installing a new one, I discovered the script I used to use to generate them missing. Instead I had to call OpenSSL directly. Luckily, the line wasn’t too hard to find.

After filling in the requisite fields in the configuration file — The most important being the "CN" field, which should contain the FQDN of the mail server.

/etc/courier/imapd.cnf:

RANDFILE = /usr/lib/courier/imapd.rand
[ req ]
default_bits = 1024
encrypt_key = yes
distinguished_name = req_dn
x509_extensions = cert_type
prompt = no
[ req_dn ]
C=AU
ST=QLD
L=Brisbane
O=Courier Mail Server
OU=Automatically-generated IMAP SSL key
CN=mail.example.com
emailAddress=postmaster@example.com
[ cert_type ]
nsCertType = server


Then generate the certificate itself with this incantation:

/usr/bin/openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes \
-config /etc/courier/imapd.cnf -out /usr/lib/courier/imapd.pem \
-keyout /usr/lib/courier/imapd.pem


Got rid of the annoying "This servers certificate is exipired" messages in my MUA anyway.

As you may be aware I am a relatively recent convert to Ubuntu. As such I am still tweaking my desktop to my liking (Who am I kidding, I don’t think I’ll ever finish tweaking it).

I was previously running Gnome (Ubuntu’s default) Desktop, except with XFWM as by Window Manager, as I have never liked Metacity (Gnome’s default WM). Today, I changed my default session (from the "Options" menu in the GDM — the graphical login screen) to XFCE, as many of the Gnome features I don’t use anyway, and I have always liked XFCE, it was on my desktop in my Gentoo day’s (that or Openbox).

Everything seemed to work fine. There were a few things I needed to configure because they were handled by Gnome application previously, but on the whole most things were very similar. The first issue I noticed was I had no sound (There is almost always music playing on my machine, as it should be). After some investigation, I discovered that ESD hadn’t started:

$ ps x | grep esd
5981 pts/1 S+ 0:00 grep esd

A quick search led me to a post on the Ubuntu Forums which wasn’t directly very helpful, but it indicated that, at least I wasn’t the only one. And it also inspired my solution.

I wrote a quick script to start ESD, but only if it isn’t already running (thanks to the problem encountered in the aforementioned post)

~/bin/startesd

#!/bin/sh
APP="/usr/bin/esd"
ARGS="-nobeeps"
if [ `pidof $APP` ]; then
#Do Nothing - already running
return
else
$APP $ARGS&
fi;


Then, by adding an entry to run that script into XFCE’s (new to me, but apparently not so new) "autostart-editor"

$ xfce4-autostart-editor

or "Autostarted Applications" in the settings menu.

I had sound, without having to manually start ESD each time.

The only other configuration I need to get round to doing it configuring my multimedia keys… but that can wait ’till some other time.