Fluxbox fonts

[aplannan]

 I'm a newbie, not really the audience for TC, but I choose TC because I thought I'd learn more using it (and it erases most of my mistakes if I don't backup!). My setup is actually almost complete (well it will never be complete, what fun would that be.). I only have one thing I can't figure out. I am using tinycore with fluxbox and have been trying to set the fonts fluxbox uses. and have been having some problems. Was wondering if anyone had any advice. Here is the fluxbox wiki page on changing fonts:

http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title=Change_font

Is tiny core compiled with libxft, is there an extension which includes it? Thought maybe that was my issue.
Changing the font is so minor and unnecessary, but I can't stop trying to do it, so I figured I'd ask for suggestions before I wasted any more hours. Thanks in advance for any help.

[curaga]

The base is compiled without Xft, but the library is included. Just load expat2 and fontconfig, and truetype fonts become available to all apps with Xft support.

[aplannan]

Thank you curaga,
I have both expat2 and expat2-dev as well as fontconfig and fontconfig-dev, so I should be set there, which means that it is not tiny core. Well, I'll keep trying
Andy

[mikshaw]

It would help to know what specific problems you're having, and what you have done to change the fonts.

It's possible that fluxbox itself was compiled without xft support. 

[aplannan]

To compile fluxbox I downloaded 1.1.1 tarball from here:
http://www.fluxbox.org/download/
and basically followed the directions here to create an extension:
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Creating+Extensions#2_Creating_a_tce
I then changed my .xsession file to read:

Xvesa -br -screen 1024x768x32 -shadow -mouse /dev/input/mice,5 -nolisten tcp -I 2>&1 > /dev/null &
[ -x ./.mouse_config ] && ./.mouse_config &
wmpower  &
xset +fp /home/tc/.fonts/ &
exec fluxbox

After that I created a /home/tc/.fonts/directory and downloaded a ttf, copied the fluxbox styles directory to the /home/tc/ directory (so that changes to styles would be saved during a backup) and modified the fluxbox init file so it would use the copied directory. After that I tried changing the fonts section of a style, to the ttf I had downloaded.

I'm pretty sure the font is not the problem. It works fine in Open Office and I used it with pekwm in puppy linux. It is possible that I missed something compiling, I am very new to this. I would be happy to make the fluxbox extension available for anyone to look at, although I'm not sure what the easiest way to do that would be (it is ~5.5MB).

There is another fluxbox wiki page which might be of interest:
http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title=Howto_install_fonts

I really don't understand everything here. I could not find/ etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Looking at how they changed the fontpath I figured this was being done by etc/fonts/fonts.conf which already had an entry for ~/.fonts/. mkfontdir did not work either, so maybe it has something to do with that. As I mentioned above, Open Office is recognizing the font in ~/.fonts.

Hoping this is useful.

[mikshaw]

Try the command "fluxbox -info".  If it shows "-XFT" that means xft was disabled.  This might result from compiling it when you don't have the xft header installed.

 

I could not find/ etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

TC doesn't have xorg in the base, so you'll need to install it to get and make use of the xorg config file. I believe you'll also need it if you want to use freetype fonts.

[aplannan]

That looks like it is the problem, -XFT is there. So how do I go about compiling so that xft is enabled?
Thank you for your help mikshaw, I was at a dead end.

[aplannan]

Actually I think I know what I did wrong. When prompted to install xorg I installed Xorg-dev.tce by accident. I'll try it again now that I have the full Xorg.

[aplannan]

Recompiled fluxbox after installing Xorg-7.4.tcel from appbrowser. fluxbox -info still showed -XFT. Not sure what to do next. Like I said, this is pretty trivial, I can read the default settings. May just wait for roberts to integrate fluxbox with tc. Thanks again the help

[aplannan]

Thought I should post that this has been solved. It was due to my inexperience compiling. I missed this line in the wiki instructions for creating extentions:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig

after that it worked great, fluxbox is working perfectly on tc!!

[sci_fi]

If possible, could someone please update the tcz library with the XFT enabled version of fluxbox?

Thanks and best regards,

sci_fi

[^thehatsrule^]

There may be some who would not want that.  One way to please everyone is to 2 extension versions... although the decision is entirely up to the extension creator.