[Bio-linux-dev] Bio-Linux 8 ready for Beta-testing

[Tony Travis]

On 01/07/14 14:14, Booth, Timothy G. wrote:
> Hi Tony,
>
> Thanks for the comments.  I'm glad that aptitude is now happy.  You
> may yet earn back the beer with your testing efforts so I won't place
> my order just yet. :-)

Hi, Tim.

I didn't know that the "aptitude -f" problems were caused by packages
that "aptitude" itself had marked for auto-removal during installation.
As you say, "aptitude" is a bit too clever for it's own good: The same
might be said about people who use it ;-)

> I'll plug an external monitor into my laptop tomorrow and see what I
> can see.  I have a "pristine" 14.04 system for comparison, so if the
> problem exists on that it will be safe to assume there is an open bug
> somewhere.  If not, I'll try and work out what I stuffed up.

The boot/lock screen seems to clone the last-used wallpaper image, but
superimposes a dot grid on it.

> Regarding the MATE desktop DPI settings, can you tell me what I need
> to modify in my package to make that happen?

On reflection, I don't think it's a good idea to change the MATE font
rendering from the default of 96dpi because X11 uses 96dpi by default.

The main reason that the default fonts look so bad in MATE seems to be
the way that MATE uses 'hinting' when rendering fonts - see:

  System / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts / Rendering / Details

The fonts look a lot better if you set 'Hinting' = None, which is what I
believe Ubuntu does.

The font settings are configured by "mate-appearance-properties", which
can also be used to install new themes from the command-line. I don't
know if you can set the default font rendering per theme, though.

To get a MATE desktop that has similar fonts to the default Unity
desktop, I increased the size of all the MATE fonts from 10 to 11pt, and
the Fixed width font from 11 to 12pt. I also set the colours in Gnome
Terminal to default black on light yellow, instead of colours from the
current theme. I think this is more legible that white.

I'm now ready to get back to work using BL8 for bioinformatics :-)

Bye,

  Tony.

--
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and
Environmental Sciences, Cruickshank Building, St. Machar Drive, Aberdeen
AB24 3UU, Scotland, UK. tel +44(0)1224 272700, fax +44 (0)1224 272 396
http://www.abdn.ac.uk, mailto:tony.travis at abdn.ac.uk, skype:ajtravis


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