I reinstalled Fedora 17 on my main work machine yesterday — I was having weird issues with gnome-boxes and virt-manager, and thought my problems might have stemmed from the weird libvirt machinations I undertook to get oVirt running on my laptop w/o disabling NetworkManager.

I always keep my home directory in a separate partition to allow for easy clean installs w/o losing my data, but this time around I copied my home directory off to a separate drive to start completely fresh — I’ll ferry needed files and folders back as needed.

One thing I had to go recreate on my new install was a set of tweaks for providing decent font rendering on Fedora. Without these steps, fonts render pretty poorly. I follow the steps in this blog post to mimic Ubuntu’s font rendering options, and then create the .fonts.conf file described here to cajole Google Chrome into obeying the rules laid out in the former step.

I hereby remind myself to look into exactly why it is that the patent fear fairies that prompt Fedora to ship with a crappy-looking font config don’t equally menace Ubuntu. I realize that my employer, with its relatively deeper pockets, presents a more attractive lawsuit target compared to Ubuntu’s sponsor, but if Fedora were to shun every piece of potentially patent encumbered software, there’d be no Fedora at all.

Where to draw the line?