Patrick's playground

Recently I've noticed all gtk2 apps becoming quite ... what's the word ... derpy?
Things like scrollbars not working and stuff. And by "not working" I mean the gtk3 behaviour of not showing up/down arrows and being a grey smudge of stupid.

So accidentally I stumbled over an old gentoo bug where it was required to deviate from defaults to have, like, icons and stuff.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me, but with gtk upstream crippling the Ad-Waiter, err, adwaita theme, because gtk3, this is a pretty sad interaction. And unsurprisingly by switching to the upstream default theme, Raleigh, gtk2 apps start looking a lot better.(Like, scrollbars and stuff)

The change might make sense to apply to Gentoo globally, locally for each user it is simply:

$ cat ~/.gtkrc-2.0
gtk-theme-name = "Raleigh"
gtk-cursor-theme-name = "Raleigh"

I'm still experimenting with 'gtk-icon-theme-name' and 'gtk-fallback-icon-theme', maybe that should change too. And as a benefit we can remove the Ad-Waiter from dependencies, possibly drop gnome-themes too, and restore a fair amount of sanity to gtk2.

Recently I accidentally aquired some "HiDPI" hardware. While it is awesome to use it quickly becomes irritating to be almost unable to read the bootup messages or work in a VT.
The documentation on fixing this is surprisingly sparse, but luckily it is very easy:

• Get a font that comes in the required sizes. media-fonts/terminus-font was the first choice I found, there may be others that are nice to use. Since terminus works well enough I didn't bother to check.
• Test the font with "setfont". The default path is /usr/share/consolefonts, and the font 'name' is just the filename without the .psf.gz suffix. If you break things you can revert to sane defaults by just calling "setfont" or rebooting the machine (ehehehehehe)
• Set the font in /etc/conf.d/consolefont. For a 210dpi notebook display I chose 'ter-v24b', but I'm considering going down a font size or two, maybe 'ter-v20b'? It's all very subjective ...
• On reboot the consolefont init script will set the required font.

Now I'm wondering if such fonts can be embedded into the kernel so that on boot it directly switches to a 'nice' font, but just being able to read the console output is a good start ...