[Tfug] Jumbo fonts in Xubuntu on XO laptop

[Jude Nelson]

Hey John,

I'm glad you're enjoying your XO!  I run Debian on a 4 GB SD card on
my Zaurus PDA and have the same problems.  Here's what I did to
minimize wear and tear on the card:

Make /var/volatile

Mount a tmpfs ramdisk on /var/volatile

Symlink /var/cache, /var/run, /var/lock, /var/log, and /var/tmp to
corresponding directories in /var/volatile/ (in RAM)

Symlink /var/cache/apt to /var/apt (so when upgrading I save my .debs
on the SD card)

Symlink /tmp to /var/tmp (which links to /var/volatile/tmp)

I modified my init scripts to save the contents of /var/volatile to
/var/volatile.bak when shutting down, and restoring them during boot.

I got the idea from Angstrom Linux (which is a stripped down Debian
variant designed for embedded devices).


Regards,
Jude

On 4/29/08, John Gruenenfelder <johng at as.arizona.edu> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've installed Xubuntu on an SD card for use in my XO laptop.  It's working
> surprising well except that fonts in X are super sized.
>
> The DPI in X is correctly set at 201x201 for the 1200x900 screen.  I've also
> just found that it appears to actually be only GTK apps.  I installed Opera
> which uses Qt and it has normal fonts.  Changing the XFCE font size setting
> had no effect as did changing the XFCE DPI setting to something else.
>
> This doesn't appear to be a problem with the particular GTK scheme used by
> XFCE and other apps since I can change that and the font sizes don't change.
> I can make a terminal usable by setting the font size (in that app
> specifically) to 6, but that's not an optimal solution.  I don't want to
> manually set every program's font size.
>
> Any ideas on what to change to fix this?
>
>
> Also, one other question about flash wear.  I'm currently running this off
> an
> SD card so I can keep the internal flash free for Sugar.  How much should I
> do
> to prevent excess writes to the SD card?  People don't seem to do anything
> different for machines with solid state drives.  Is there a big difference
> between how an SS harddrive and an SD card do wear-leveling?
>
> For example, I plan to put /var/log on a tmpfs ramdisk since I really don't
> need semi-permanent logs on this machine and those are written to
> frequently.
> Should I make any other changes?  Is it worth it?
>
>
> --
> --John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
>                         Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
> Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://weaselreader.org
> "This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
> of my enemies!"
>         --Sam of Sam & Max
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>