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Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
While I have a previous posting from 2009 that discusses adding Microsoft’s Core Fonts to the then current version of Fedora, it did strike me that I hadn’t laid out the series of command that were used. Instead, I referred to an external and unofficial Fedora FAQ. That’s still there but I also felt that I was leaving things a little to chance given how websites can disappear quite suddenly.
Even after next to four years, it still amazes me that you cannot install Microsoft’s Core Fonts in Fedora as you would in Ubuntu, Linux Mint or even Debian. Therefore, the following series of steps is as necessary now as it was then.
The first step is to add in a number of precursor applications such as wget for command line file downloading from websites, cabextract for extracting the contents of Windows CAB files, rpmbuild for creating RPM installers and utilities for the XFS file system that chkfontpath needs:
sudo yum -y install rpm-build cabextract ttmkfdir wget xfs
Here, I have gone with terminal commands that use sudo but you could become the superuser (root) for all of this and there are those who believe you should. The -y switch tells yum to go ahead with prompting you for permission before it does any installations. The next step is to download the Microsoft fonts package with wget:
sudo wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
Once that is done, you need to install the chkfontpath package because the RPM for the fonts cannot be built without it:
sudo rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath
Once that is in place, you are ready to create the RPM file using this command:
sudo rpmbuild -ba msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
After the RPM has been created, it is time to install it:
sudo yum install --nogpgcheck ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
When installation has completed, the process is done. Because I used sudo, all of this happened in my own home area so there was a need for some housekeeping afterwards. If you did it by becoming the root user, then the files would be there instead and that’s the scenario in the online FAQ.
chkfontpath link doesn’t seem to work – I used http://dl.atrpms.net/f19-x86_64/atrpms/stable/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm instead
sudo rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/f19-x86_64/atrpms/stable/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm
Retrieving http://dl.atrpms.net/f19-x86_64/atrpms/stable/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc19.x86_64.rpm
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.uqFC0d: Header V4 DSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 66534c2b: NOKEY
Preparing… ################################# [100%]
Updating / installing…
1:chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc19 ################################# [100%]
Probably no harm to state that the above applies to 64-bit users and it may differ for the 32-bit version. Otherwise, it’s worth a go so thanks for sharing this.
I also had to change last command into
sudo yum install –nogpgcheck /root/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
since the rpm path was made under root home and not mine (as meant by ~) even though I ran all commands with sudo.
Except this and the same problem reported by lajihukou, everything worked perfectly.
Thanks.