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).

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.

Well, this is one of the niftiest utilities I’ve found in a while. It’s dawned on me in the past that this should be possible, but I’ve never really investigated it until now, probably because at work my desktop is a Windows box.

The sshfs "driver" allows transparent mounting of a remote directory via the standard SSH protocol.

I’m using sshfs to remotely mount the a directory on my development web server, instead of having to install a full server on my desktop. The box is sitting just across the room, why not. This allows me to use all my normal development tools, without the hassle of manually transferring the files every time a change is made.

While this may not be suitable for a staging box where multiple people are working on it, for my little network it makes things easier (the web folder is also a subversion working copy — but this is only a development server remember)

It’s also simple to set up, requiring no configuration on the server. Following the general gist (I already had much of it set up) of the instructions found on a fellow Ubuntu users blog I can now mount remote directories by using:

sshfs server:/my/remote/directory/ /my/local/mountpoint


If only this was available for Windows, I’d never have to work on my local machine again (WinSCP does a pretty good job, but it’s not quiet as seamless)