This probably ranks quite low on the scale of “Things Geeks Should Do With Their Linux Boxen,” but I’ve been wanting to see working anti-aliased Truetype fonts under Linux for years. Thanks to the instructions on this page I was able to do just that. Actually, I had to read the gdkxft documentation thoroughly and repeatedly as there were some quirks on my newly-rebuilt Zero that made it a bit more difficult to implement.

As of now, Zero has a nearly complete set of software and interfaces. My next move is to set up some more of the guts-level stuff, mostly so that when the machine is restarted everything comes back up that’s supposed to. (Email, webserver, etc.)

At long last, I have audio and visual cable TV on my computer. Again. This time around, though, it’s the new ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card that’s providing the TV tuning. It took some hoop-jumping to get working, including a switch to the Alsa sound drivers. Turns out that yes, Virginia, the internal audio cables on the AiW Radeon are just like those on earlier AiW models.

In other news, I’ve stocked my Mozilla 1.0.0-rc1 install with the usual slate of plugins; Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer and the Java Runtime Environment 1.4.0 are all installed on the box; Evolution is working perfectly. It kind of balances out the parts of my workday that were totally crappy…

Just to prove that I know what I’m doing when it comes to building a working Linux rig from scratch, the Current Music information has returned to this page. As before, it is fed from Zero’s copy of XMMS and her Apache+PHP webserver.

Damn, I love this geek stuff. Damn, I’m good.

As of this writing, Zero is now a Linux From Scratch rig. All she can do at the moment is run XFree86 4.2.0, watch TV on her spanking new Radeon All-in-Wonder (but no sound as yet, need a mixer) and accept email directed to my username at zero.kgon.com.

Next up: Install GNOME from sources, install Evolution from sources, get SSH, SNMP and Apache+PHP working, install some truetype fonts, get cd ripping and burning to work, and perform various other small install processes that need doing along the way. Hell, I might even put KDE3 onto this thing. All of this not necessarily done in the order stated here.

While I’m in the process of turning Zero into a full-fledged Linux From Scratch rig, I’ve disabled any features here that rely on that machine. The random-email and current-music widgets both lived there, and will return just as soon as Zero is back to a fully operational state.

Because the world really, really needs another geek with a gigantic taglines collection… I present unto you my complete taglines file. Be careful, it’s 164 kilobytes in size. It’s been sorted and lightly duplicate-checked, and contains lots of geeky stuff as well as the occasional tagline you don’t want to show your parents. Or your children, depending.

The majority of these came to me from the proprietress of Cosmic Central, so you should probably peek in at her site. She’s good people.