Getting GNOME3 on openSUSE 11.4

openSUSE is currently the only major Linux distro that has worked to offer the latest GNOME 3 Desktop Environment to its current branch.

openSUSE 11.4 users can navigate to this page http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME3 to get some GNOME 3 goodness.

Font Smoothing in openSUSE

I have heard people commenting on how "ugly" openSUSE looks compared to the smoothness of Ubuntu. It's all relative one may argue, but having a pleasant UI matters to us who stare at the screen for long periods of time.

OOTB openSUSE doesn't do font smoothing or subpixel hinting due to freetype2's subpixel hinting implementation may infringe Microsoft's ClearType patents. This is why it is disabled both upstream (by the freetype2 authors) and in the freetype2 RPM packages that ship with openSUSE.

To solve this, we need to replace the default freetype2 RPM with a copy from the OBS.

Navigate to http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting

Follow the instructions to either do it from the CLI or 1-Click install.

openSUSE users may also click on this link to execute the YMP (YaST Meta Package) to kickstart the process.

Installing Ubuntu Fonts in openSUSE 11.4

Although I do not use Ubuntu and its derivatives extensively in my daily computing, the short sojourn I had with Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) impressed upon me the Ubuntu font.

While openSUSE 11.4 has a large amount of font types to choose from, I still find that the Ubuntu font is pretty awesome; I especially like it on my HP Mini 2140 netbook running openSUSE 11.4.

To install the Ubuntu font type on openSUSE 11.4 :

1. Download the latest Ubuntu font type from http://font.ubuntu.com/
2. Unzip the zip archive - unzip ubuntu-font-family-0.71.2.zip
3. Move the unzipped directory to /usr/share/fonts - mv ubuntu-font-family-0.71.2/ /usr/share/fonts
4. Run SuSEconfig and you are good to go.
   
   

Note that the font archive version may differ from the above example.

Banshee 2.0 is out!

Banshee is an open source media player that is based on Gtk# and Mono and uses the Gstreamer framework for multimedia file playback. It can also be used for managing podcasts and listening to online radio.

The new 2.0 version introduces a Windows build.

Go get it at http://banshee.fm/download/

Banshee is a project sponsored by Novell SUSE.