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CDs, and TrueType Fonts—Day 18© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I have spent some more time browsing through the Slackware rc.d files and doing some fine-tuning. I’m learning but at a snail’s pace. This is the painful part of migrating—the insane slowness of ingesting information and becoming more knowledgeable. For a while I was lost about mounting and unmounting removable media. With Mandrake I got spoiled because of the supermount kernel patch. Slackware offers no such tool. I was unsure how to go about mounting and unmounting removable media on the fly. Why isn’t supermount embedded into the kernel? I think newer kernels support some kind of automounting, but I am unsure. However, I did finally succeed with my CD drives. I’m guessing the solution is much more a result of using KDE 3.3.1 than anything else. I have two CD drives. The first drive is an HP 9300 CD Writer, the second is a Creative Labs (Matshita CR-585) 24x CD reader. Both are connected to the second IDE controller.
I long ago grew accustomed in Windows to ejecting my CDs using context menus. These KDE desktop icons provide several context menu options that have long been missing from the GNU/Linux GUI world: (1) Open, (2) Mount, and (3) Eject. These three menu options are flexible. If I have a file manager window already open, then I need only select the mount command and then browse to the appropriate directory in the file manager. If I have no file manager open, then the Open command both mounts the CD and opens the file manager. Similarly, I can select the Unmount command from the context menu as long as nothing has a file lock on the disks, such as an open file manager. Or I can select the Eject option, which both unmounts and ejects the disk. Floppy disks don’t work exactly the same because they are ejected only manually. However, what seems to be a good habit to form is to treat floppies the same as the CDs and use the same context menu process. An added touch is whenever the removable media drives are mounted, a small green triangle appears at the bottom right corner of the desktop icon. The manual eject button on the CD drives stop working while the system has disks mounted. None of this is as smooth as Windows or the kernel supermount patch, but is much more doable than playing the mount and umount game through the command line. This is a step in the right direction although I expect typical home users to scratch their heads over this “mounting” business. The supermount is the way to go, especially when considering that this process I just described is unavailable outside of KDE. Lastly, I installed my TrueType font collection without breaking a sweat. I already had the fonts installed at /usr/local/share/fonts/ttf. I use a separate partition for /usr/local so I don’t have to reinstall those fonts whenever I tinkered with different distros. I added that font path to xorg.conf. I then ran fc-cache –fv from the command line and I was almost finished. As root I opened the KDE control panel and went to the system administration section, which contains a font installer. I did not have to do anything more than let the installer recognize the new fonts directory. Then I restarted KDE and all of my TrueType fonts were available. With some quick changes in the KDE control panel Appearances and Themes—Fonts, I was finished with configuring fonts. I also configured Konqueror’s fonts, although at this time I don’t plan to use Konqueror as a browser. On my to-do list:
I feel good about my progress, but I again feel exhausted. All of my effort thus far has had little to do with being productive on GNU/Linux. All I have done is twiddle with simply being able to boot and have a nice desktop to look at! Finis. |
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