I use vncserver / vncviewer for more than you can imagine, mostly as a reasonable replacement for screen when working off of spotty wireless networks. I was pretty bummed out after upgrading a number of machines to Centos 5, that the fonts in gnome-terminal weren't anti-aliased anymore. I'm a sucker for a smooth-edged Bitsteam Vera Sans Mono.
After digging around a bit, and following a couple red herrings in the form of ~/.fonts.config, or /etc/fonts/.., I found a couple references to anti-aliasing being slow only with xservers that supported XRender, of course vncserver doesn't implement this extension, so that was a potential clue that something along these lines was the issue. Hmm, I never noticed gnome-terminal being slow unless I was tail -f'ing a webserver log or something else spouting prodigious amounts of output.
Finally, I remembered the gconf tree and finally the tool gconf-editor, which hadn't been installed by default on any of my Centos 5 installs. One invocation of yum later, I had gconf-editor installed and was poking around in the apps/gnome-terminal folder. It turns out that under there, in the profiles/default folder there's the no_aa_without_render option, which was enabled by default. Unchecking this fixed the problem -- ahh, a nice smooth Bitstream Vera Mono in my gnome-terminal again.
As an aside, I was pretty surprised to see the number of people asking how to turn off anti-aliasing instead of turning it on -- I can understand a certain affection for Misc-fixed, but fonts without jagged edges are just so much easier on my eyes. I guess all things being equal, this would probably work on Redhat Enterprise Linux / rhel 5 as well.
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6 comments:
Thanks Drew, I spent such a long time figuring this one out. Was trying to configure vnc before I realised All I needed was gconftool-2 -s /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/no_aa_without_render -t bool false
Thank you, this worked for me on CentOS 5.2 accessing via VNC.
This also worked for me on Ubuntu.
This worked for me on Fedora Core 6. I was searching for a fix for this problem at least twice before without success and giving up each time and silently greeving over the loss of the nice looking gnome-terminal fonts I used to have through VNC on FC4. Thanks Drew. Finally, I can stop feeling like I lost by upgrading to FC6 ... well I definitely lost time searching.
Thanks, this is confirmed to work on Red Hat Enterprise Server 5.2
@Ben, I think you mean CentOS, aparently it was wokring in RHEL all the time, they had figured it out and configured it that way as the default.
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