Sysadmin Ramblings

Using unicode fonts is the easiest way to properly display hindi, arabic, hebrew and other non latin languages. We install the unicode fonts in a local directory and then tell fontconfig to look in that directory. Edit /etc/fonts/local.conf

 

<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file for local customizations -->

<dir>/usr/ias/share/fonts/fc</dir>

Then tell fontconfig to rehash it’s tables

[root@host] # fc-cache

Check that your new font is there

[root@host] # fc-list |grep

10-1   Signal weak                   10-8   In service

10-2   Signal good                   10-9   Repeat

10-3   Stop transmitting             10-10  Negative

10-4   Affirmative                   10-12  Stand by

10-6   Busy                          10-19  Return to station

10-7   Out of service                10-23  Arrived at scene

Alpha	Bravo	Charlie	Delta	Echo
Foxtrot	Golf	Hotel	India	Juliet
Kilo	Lima	Mike	November	Oscar
Papa	Quebec	Romeo	Sierra	Tango
Uniform	Victor	Whiskey	X-Ray	Yankee
Zulu

After modifying gdm.conf we noticed that Xnewt would not start properly on occassion. Xnewt was not ignoring the vt[0-9] command line option sent to X to specify a virtual console on which to run. We removed this from the command line sent to Xnewt and renamed Xnewt to Xnewt.sun

pushd /usr/X11R6/bin

mv Xnewt Xnewt.sun

echo << EOF >Xnewt

#!/bin/sh

 

XFIX=`echo $@ |sed -e's/vt[0-9]*//'`

echo `date`: ARGS=$@ XFIX=$XFIX >>/var/log/Xnewt

 

exec Xnewt.sun $XFIX -fp unix/:7100

EOF

chmod 755 Xnewt

popd

IBM/Lenovo have a utility to remap the windows key, it’s called

TpKmapAp.exe

(Keyboard Customizer Utility) It’s in Program Files\ThinkPad\Utilities on our X41’s.