Firefox font smoothing in Linux

After upgrading to Fedora 16, I noticed that the font rendering looked awful in Firefox. Even an upgrade to Firefox Aurora made no difference. Purely out of desperation, I tried a method I had used previously to fix a similar issue with Chrome, (http://www.lucidelectricdreams.com/2010/09/ugly-font-rendering-in-chrome-linux.html) and hit the jackpot!.

The original post by Zach Beane can be found here and all credit should go to him.

Save the following to ~/.fonts.conf:
<match target="font">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
<const>hintslight</const>
</edit>
</match>

Firefox 4 Beta On Fedora

Just stumbled on this blog post while skimming through Google Reader and thought I should share it.

To get the latest Beta installed, follow these steps:


sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-firefox4.repo http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/firefox4/fedora-firefox4.repo

sudo yum install firefox4

Firefox 3 sets a world record !

The Firefox Download Day was an absolute success with over 8 million unique copies downloaded within the first 24 hours of release. The Guiness book of world records has officially confirmed it today.

Don't forget to get your Download Day contributor certificate. :) Mozilla will be mailing you a link to the site to download it.

Wine 1.0 and Firefox 3.0

Well.. today seems to be a big day for FOSS. Major releases of two of the best and greatest open source software were released a few hours apart on a single day !. Version 3 of Firefox, undoubtedly the best web browser ever, was released a few hours ago. (Don't forget to help the Mozilla team in their world record attempt by downloading a copy of Firefox.) Then to add icing to the cake, the Wine team have released version 1.0 of wine, which has been 15 years in the works ! This is indeed a great day for FOSS supporters everywhere.

I compiled wine 1.0 on my Fedora 9 system with minimum hassle. In fact, all I had to do was download the sources, untar them and then run the command:
./tools/wineinstall

At one point the compilation process failed throwing an error on dlls/user32/tests/menu.c. I simply deleted menu.c from the sources list of dlls/user32/tests/Makefile and everything worked perfectly !

Congratulations are in order for all Mozilla and Wine developers. Great job guys. Keep it up !