Distributions implementing Infinality out of the box?
 

Hi,

I'm thinking about trying out Infinality:

http://someslack.wordpress.com/infinality-on-slackware/

Before getting my hands dirty with rebuilding stuff and diving into font configuration files, I wonder if some Linux distributions (KDE-based and/or Xfce-based) already implement this out of the box. I'd like to give it a quick spin, just to see if it really makes a difference.

Any suggestions?

It took some magic with DuckDuckGo, but I found one. Fuduntu came with Infinality by default, and although Fuduntu has bit the dust, their last release was not too long ago - they use the 3.2 kernel.

It looks like the Fuduntu devs now maintain a branch of packages for openSUSE called Cloverleaf, so you could also try working your way through that.

Finally, Infinality maintains official packages for Fedora, so that is also a natural fit.

EDIT: Grammar!

EDIT AGAIN: Fuduntu's site is really iffy, but the Sourceforge page is still up.

Fuduntu's site has been offline for a few months now as the VPSs are all turned down. The SourceForge page is the best place to get the source.

In addition to the Cloverleaf packages for openSUSE that the Cloverleaf team maintains, I maintain a few packages including infinality for CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6, and RHEL 6.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuduntu-el

Thanks for your suggestions. I fired up the Fuduntu Live DVD in VirtualBox and saw no real difference. So right now I'm installing two identical Slackware 14.0 desktops side by side, one vanilla, the other with Infinality packages, and then I'll see for myself.

Gentoo also.

Is the question related to the xorg 1.14 upgrade in -current?

Currently I'm still on xorg 1.13 and I simply drop in the slackware packages

available here:

ftp://someslack.myftp.org/infinality...type/packages/

I don't bother with qt. It works, despite -current having a more recent freetype.

I installed infinality in my own Slackware box and I haven't seen real BIG differences (seems to be a bit different, but not really that much better).


I would greatly appreciate if you could post comparison screenshots from your systems, kikinovak

Right, here goes.

Vanilla Slackware and KDE vs. Infinality "Win7" style.

Conclusion: I like it.

I'm not sure which font I like better, but the Win7 style certainly makes better use of space.

Hmmm yeah the main difference I noticed too in my own machine was that the letters were a bit closer together, and things weren't so "big" overall anymore

I've used Infinality, and for some reason I notice that on some machines it (or an alternative font improvement) is almost necessary, while on others it doesn't make a difference. For instance, I have a netbook running Slackware 14 where the fonts look downright bad without Infinality, but the fonts on my Zenbook running Slackware64-current look perfect out of the box. I haven't tried Infinality on them, but I think if I did, the change would be minimal.

I'm not sure what causes the difference, but it is something to be aware of.

I fiddled around some more with Infinality on different machines running KDE and Xfce, using various styles (Win7, OSX, Ubuntu, etc.) and I must say, I really like it. I guess I'll include it in my MLED and MLWS repos (in fact it's already compiling), with a little Quick-and-Dirty-HOWTO on how to enable it. Rebuilding and uploading Qt will take a little while though. I'll keep you posted.

Kudos to Dimitris Tsagkatakis for the excellent article on his blog, and for all the hard work.

Niki

Thanks Niki. I just saw this thread. Btw, Sabayon seems to incorporate the patches as well.

For me, the default font rendering that most distros come with is just-plain-horrible. Those thin, spider-ish letters... Of course, If you fiddle a bit with the settings you can make things somewhat tolerable, but the fonts will still look smudgy IMO. Infinality is not perfect either (sometimes due to limitations of freetype itself) but it's certainly a step up, and good enough for me to just stop worrying about fonts, and get on with my work ;-)

I played around a bit with Infinality, but I didn't incorporate it into my repo, because I have some more experimenting to do with it. The user interface fonts are really improved, but on the other hand, I had some little surprises with web page rendering in Firefox. So I guess I'll play around with it some more and consider it for the 14.1 release.

Yes, I know, I mentioned Sabayon in case someone wants to try out the patches without touching his Slack. If there's anything that I can be of help, let me know. Problems with the patched library can be reported here.