Some post-installation steps to make Fedora 19 more comfortable

So, as you may now, Fedora 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat) has released for few days. And this time I decided to upgrade my PC immediately, and everything seems to be very smooth.

For Fedora, I have to make some minor changes to make it more comfortable, such as:

• Install Liberation Fonts (version 2).
• Fix the font's rendering problem.

Liberation Fonts

Liberation fonts are installed in Fedora by default. However, it is kept at version 1.07 with very poor quality. And to get the much better quality, I always upgrade them to version 2.

You can download compiled fonts from the Liberation Fonts page or RPM packages from Fedora's page. I choose the former method.

$ wget https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/liberation-fonts/liberation-fonts-ttf-2.00.0.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf liberation-fonts-ttf-2.00.0.tar.gz
$ sudo cp -f liberation-fonts-ttf-2.00.1/*.ttf /usr/share/fonts/liberation/
$ sudo fc-cache

Now the Liberation fonts are ready to use. We will fix the font rendering problem before change font settings for GNOME to reflect what we have done so far.

Fix Font Rendering Problem

If you've ever see an Ubuntu screen, you may see a much better font rendering. The problem here is Fedora disable RGBA sub-pixel hinting. All you have to do is to enable such feature by install package freetype-freeworld from RPM Fusion.

$ rpm -ivh ftp://mirror.switch.ch/pool/3/mirror/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/19/Everything/x86_64/os/freetype-freeworld-2.4.11-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm

Now, to change the default fonts and default font hinting methods for GNOME, you should install gnome-tweak-tool.

$ sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool
$ gnome-tweak-tool &

Change the default font settings as in the below screen.

To make everything the same as Ubuntu, you should run the following command.

$ echo "Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault" >> ~/.Xresources

You may need to log out and log in again to reflect the changes.