Solaris Fonts on Linux?

IOstream asks: "I was wondering if anyone has a way to get all of the Solaris fonts into XFree86 on Linux, or at least something similar... I am wondering for two reasons: 1) their fonts seem much cleaner, and Linux apps look better exported to Solaris as a result, 2) there are some sun apps which are dependant on Suns fonts, and the display will not export properly... "

What is the issue?

[Gleef]

I thought Solaris primarily used Type1 fonts. Type 1 fonts are easy to install in Linux. (although I don't know how XFree86's rasterizer compares to Sun's).

Hm...

[Wakko Warner]

Not sure what the difference would be, but when I decided I liked the fonts on the SGI at work, I simply tarred the directory up, FTPed it to my personal machine at home, untarred it, and did the normal X font-adding procedure, followed by xset fp rehash. They were immediately available to me.

I haven't tried this with my solaris box. Maybe I should.


- A.P.
--

"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

How about XFS?

[Fandango]

The easiest way to export fonts from a Solaris machine (or any box running X) is to install the X Font Server (on Solaris, this is the SUNWxwfs package).

Solaris includes a utility called fsadmin which you can use to add the appropriate line to /etc/inetd.conf to start the font server when someone connects to it.

Now, to configure your Linux box to access the Solaris font server, add something like "tcp/hostname:7100" to the FontPath line in your XF86Config file.

If you'd rather not use the font server, another, more complicated, option is to duplicate the CDE font aliases on your Linux system. The reason CDE programs look strange when run on your Linux system is that they look for font names starting with "-dt-", which CDE installs as aliases to regular X fonts. Try this to see a list:

grep -- -dt- /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts/*/fonts.*

Now, make sure your Linux configuration has the fonts installed that the alias lines refer to (if not, look up the font filenames in fonts.dir and copy them to the Linux box), then add the alias lines to your fonts.alias files on the Linux side. Do an xset fp rehash and you should see the new fonts in an xlsfonts listing.

You'll need to have some knowledge of the fonts.alias and fonts.dir files in order to figure out how to implement this second approach, but I have done it before, so I know it's possible. Each line in fonts.alias maps a font alias to a real font name. Each line in fonts.dir maps a filename on disk to its font name. Solaris includes some proprietary scaled fonts in the F3 directory that XFree86 doesn't support, but there seem to be bitmap versions in the F3bitmaps directory (as of Solaris 2.6 at least), and the CDE aliases refer to those so you should be okay.

Good luck!

Solaris fonts

[Tet]

I was wondering if anyone has a way to get all of the Solaris fonts into XFree86 on Linux, or at least something similar.

At my last job, I had a Sparc running Linux. It also had a Solaris disk in it (but I didn't boot into that much :-). To get at the fonts, I simply mounted the appropriate Solaris partitions and used xset fp+ to add the fonts directories to the font path. Under XFree86, you could also set the font path in XF86Config, but xset will work on any X server.

Display Ghostscipt

[fishbowl]

It goes beyond "putting the Solaris fonts on Xfree", because we don't have DPS. DPS is
one great thing to like about Sun.

F3 fonts are dead

[scrytch]

They've been dead since Solaris 2.5 I think. Solaris uses only type1 fonts now, so the only tool you need is cp.

Ironic that you ask that, because I wouldn't mind making the fonts on my solaris box look as nice as the ones I have on my linux box.

re-using these fonts?

[cleeland]

Wondering if anybody knows how to get access to the postscript version of the fonts on the Sun, or even the ones that are included in Ghostscript. I have a NeXT with a NeXTLaser attached that could really use the rest of the "Standard 13", e.g., Avant-Garde, Bookman, etc.