The 9x15 font versus DOSEMU's vga font
![]() 9x15
|
![]() vga
|
I dipped into my archives to fish out the old DOSEMU vga font. It is a thing of beauty.
-
The 9x15 existed on Lubuntu and I must have been using it throughout my time up until Lubuntu's retirement on 2016-03-26.
Comparison ∞
9x15 has been my long-time favourite though.
-
Compared to 9x15, vga is taller and thinner* vga doesn't look too good with bold fonts, so it should be used with a terminal that supports un-bolding (e.g. xfce's terminal) or after editing
LS_COLORS
to not use bold (e.g.01;32
becomes00;32
)
Notes ∞
2014-06-04 ∞
Tested aterm 1.00.01 on 2014-06-04 on Lubuntu 14.04, updated recently.
FONTDIR="/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc" file=vga.pcf.gz \sudo \mkdir --parents "$FONTDIR" \mkdir temp.$$ \cd temp.$$ \cp ../$file ./ \gzip -d $file \sudo \cp ./vga.pcf $FONTDIR \cd $FONTDIR \sudo \mkfontdir \xset fp rehash \xset fp+ $FONTDIR \cd -
For aterm, I can make this font default by editing ~/.Xdefaults
and adding
aterm*font: vga
See aterm for more changes.
2009-04-18 ∞
This was probably tested with Unity Linux.
I have no note as to which terminal I was using back then.
To install vga, one of these ought to work.
kcontrol
- The KDE control panel-
drakfont
- This didn't work for me.drakfont --install vga.pcf.gz
gave me "There are no PostScript fonts in this directory
" so it's probably not the right command to use.
Some distributions allow this:
-
FONTDIR=~/.fonts
Maybe this is XOrg, or just for newer X installations. It's what worked for me on PCLinuxOS 2007 (updated recently):
-
FONTDIR=/usr/share/fonts/misc/
Standard X11 stuff, works ok on Slackware 8.0 etc.:
-
FONTDIR=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/
If you use FONTDIR, then do this:
\cp vga.pcf.gz $FONTDIR \cd $FONTDIR \mkfontscale \mkfontdir \fc-cache \echo Now restart X
Using ∞
Your font can can be specified when opening the terminal, with a command like this:
\xterm -fn vga -bg black -fg gray -geometry 80x24+0+0
Most terminals are xterm-compatible, in that you could just replace xterm with your terminal of choice:
rxvt -fn vga -bg black -fg gray -geometry 80x24+0+0
Using with "modern" terminals ∞
(props)
Some terminals only use the stock fonts and won't use your misc. .pcf fonts. This includes gnome-terminal and xfce's terminal.
To fix this, edit ~/.fonts.conf
and add these lines right after the <fontconfig>
opening tag:
<!-- Accept bitmap fonts --> <selectfont> <acceptfont> <pattern> <patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt> </pattern> </acceptfont> </selectfont>
Oldschool Linux ∞
vga will be included in Oldschool Linux and used by default, but I will also make sure there is an easy way to revert back to the 9x15 (or possibly any font of choice).