Anti-aliased fonts in gnome-terminal on Centos 5

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.