Viv le Liberation!

I’ve see many posts about how bad the default Sans font is in Ubuntu (it really is) and suggestions that people use the Bitstream Vera font as their default. I had made the switch and was a little happier, but it still wasn’t quite right. Then earlier this week I saw a post about the Liberation font on Planet Ubuntu and realized that I had not only found my new default sans serif font, I had also found new serif and monospaced (Courier) fonts, too. And everyone can use them, even Windows users.

Rather than borrow Philip Newborough’s great sample images of the fonts (or even worse, hotlinking to them), you can check them out on his blog. They really are great alternatives to Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, plus they’re licensed under the GNU Public License, which fits in wonderfully if you have an open source philosophy.

Chris was surprised to see that nobody had packaged them for easy installation so he packaged them himself. You can get his handy .deb file, or you can install them from apt with very little fuss and absolutely no muss in either Feisty or Gutsy.

1. Open your sources.list file to edit it with this terminal command
   gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
2. At the very bottom of the list add these two lines (or add them in your Software Sources under the Third-Party Software tab)
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/corenominal/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/corenominal/ubuntu gutsy main
3. Close gedit, but before you update Apt let’s add the public key so Apt doesn’t fuss because the source isn’t trusted. First get the public key
wget http://crunchbang.org/misc/corenominal.key
4. And add the key to Apt’s keyring so it can know the lines you added to the sources list is a trusted resource
   gpg --export --armor FC2682F1 | sudo apt-key add -
5. Now you can update your apt listings to grab available programs from your new sources
   sudo apt-get update
6. Once your computer has finished getting the updated list of software available to you, install the fonts by simply typing this in the terminal:
   sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation

That’s it! You’re now ready to enjoy Liberation in all of it’s glory. You can now do fin things like changing your desktop font to use Liberation instead of whatever it’s set to now. I don’t recall where it is in Feisty, but in Gutsy go to System > Preference > Appearance > Fonts.

And of course if you don’t use Ubuntu you can still choose to use the Liberation fonts. Simply visit the Red Hat website and get them. I’m afraid you’re on your own to install them, though

Now if I could only use that font on my blog. At least you’ll see it in something I’m working on for my store, which I hope to have unveiled next weekend.