(Re)setting Resoution and fonts on the olpc under xfce

Fonts on the olpc under a non-Sugar window manager are kind of messed up. Under xfce I had to go through multiple hoops to get them to work look the right relative sizes. The second time I have to do this is as good a time as any to document this.

First of all, starting with xfce on ubuntu as prepared by mocapean, most things work ok. When you install gdm though, stuff gets crazy. Font size doubles in gtk apps.

Xfce system font sizes

Just go through the menu settings for xfce control panels. Go to Settings>User Interface first and set to sans 6. Then go to Settings>Window Manager and set window title fonts to sans bold 7
Done.

Gtk apps

put following in .gtkrc-2.0 file in homedir

style "user-font"
{
    font_name="DejaVu Sans 6"
}
gtk-font-name="DejaVu Sans 6"

KDE apps

Create or edit the file ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals

[General]
 StandardFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,6,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
 activeFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,6,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0
 fixed=Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,6,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
 font=Bitstream Vera Sans,6,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
 menuFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,6,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0
 taskbarFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,6,-1,5,50,1,0,0,0,0
 toolBarFont=Bitstream Vera Sans,6,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0

Other stuff

On the ubuntu image I am using, this is done for us. However, if we're going to monkey around a bit with the system's dpi settings

$ xdpyinfo | grep resol

Comes back with the dpi of your screen. The olpc is 201x201 dots per inch.

xdpyinfo | grep dimen

Comes back with

dimensions:    1200x900 pixels (152x114 millimeters)

on the olpc. Incidently, millimeters is pixels/length * 25.4.