font sizes in gnome terminal are smaller when running realVNC realVNC

[Jon Peatfield]

On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Williams, Chris (Marlboro) wrote:

> The 'vncserver' command is a perl wrapper around the actual Xvnc binary.
> You might want to look at what command is being run for the actual Xvnc
> binary too. I use a simple command to start the vnc server:
>
> Xvnc :2 -desktop <host>:2 (<username>) -httpd /usr/share/vnc/classes
> -auth /home/<username>/.Xauthority -geometry 1552x1100 -depth 16
> -rfbwait 30000 -rfbauth /home/<username>/.vnc/passwd -rfbport 5902 -pn
> -SecurityTypes=none
>
> There is an -fp option you can pass to the Xvnc server it pass it font
> options I think but I don't know how to use it. Apparently you can point
> it to a font server like -fp unix/:7100

For our (somewhat modified) vncserver script we add:

   -fp unix/:7100,built-ins

and that seems to work well enough to satisfy our users.  Of course this 
isn't on Fedora-9 - we mostly have sl5 desktops which like centos-5 is 
very similar to RHEL-5.

This is the relevant bit of the unidiff of our script and the shipped 
vncserver, hopefully this makes sense:

  # Add font path and color database stuff here, e.g.:
  #
+# This is the default font path one gets on the console, but isn't
+# what Xvnc seems to get unless the fp is specified here!
+$cmd .= " -fp unix/:7100,built-ins";
  # $cmd .= " -fp /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/,/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/";
  # $cmd .= " -co /usr/lib/X11/rgb";

I suppose that working out what a 'console' X fontpath would actually get 
might be a good idea but as a test you should be able to just run 'xset q' 
to show what the fp is on each system.

Note that plenty of 'modern' apps often seem to actually ignore the X 
fonts altogether and do their own thing - at least if they detect the 
RENDER extension.  Of course the Xvnc we use doesn't seem to default to 
providing the RENDER extension.

  -- Jon