On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 11:11:14PM -0700, C. Brewer wrote: > Anti-aliasing fonts and icons (through KDE), do I need it? What is the > purpose? And if it's a good thing,where to find simple info? The technical > advice on many subjects often leaves me bewildered:(
Fonts are (ideally) made up of nice geometric curves and so can be scaled in size with no loss of quality. Your screen displays bitmaps though, so they have to be converted before you can see them. This bit is called `rasterisation' and is surprisingly tricky to do well. Run xmag and look at some text on your screen. You'll notice that the edge is blocky and uneven; this blockiness is called aliasing. There are two ways to get rid of this blockiness: increase the resolution (pixels/cm) of your display or hide it (anti-aliasing). Obviously, the hiding method is a lot easier to do in software than the resolution one:) So anti-aliasing software blends the edges of your text with the background it's sitting on, making it look a _lot_ smoother, but sometimes a bit smudgy. There are lots of ways to do this, but the best method in common usage is patented by Apple and is thus unavailable to Free software users. There's lots of debate about AA these days. Some people love it, some people hate it. If you're using KDE, then you can enable it in the `Font' section of the Control Centre (IIRC, it's been a while...). If you're using GNOME 1.4, install the `gdkxft-capplet' package and enable AA in the Gdkxft section of the Control Panel. Give it a try, you might like it. It's easy enough to disable, and it doesn't cause too much of a slowdown on your system either. You will need good quality fonts though; the best seem either MS's in the msttfcorefonts package unfortunately, but they'll have to do until some really good Free fonts appear. > Also noted that my system does not power down on halt. I changed my prefs in > KDE to use /sbin/poweroff instead of /sbin/halt. After reading the man pages > on poweroff, halt and reboot, I am left even more confused. The man pages say > that when halt or poweroff is called from other than runlevels 0 or 6, it > invokes shutdown instead. I have tried,as root and user to /sbin/halt -p, > /sbin/poweroff and just plain poweroff, all ending with the system going > through the halt process and stopping with the message : Power Down, without > actually killing the power. Looking in my /etc/init.d/ I see the halt and > reboot scripts, but I am lacking the equivalent for poweroff. Is this the I think you just need to enable APM support. Add a line that says append="apm=on" to your lilo.conf, re-run lilo and reboot. It should (if your hardware supports it) power itself off the next time you shutdown. -rob
msg09422/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
