Thursday, February 25, 2010

libpng12.so.0 missing problem in Archlinux

Archlinux has been offering libpng14 recently, however if some self-compiled packages are used in the system, it may turn out an disaster :(

I had cario, freetype2 & libxft compiled from abs so as to enable sort of cleartype effect in type rendering, however, after I updated libpng recently from version 12 to 14, I cannot boot into gdm correctly. I cannot even run vim in a console for it complains that libpng12.so.0 cannot be found.

So I have to:

  1. boot with run level 3 (adding 3 at the end of grub's kernel line);
  2. login as root and remove self-compiled packages that require libpng12, cario, freetype2 & libxft in my case (I found -d option useful since I will soon reinstall these packages);
  3. recompile new versions with libpng14;
  4. install those packages.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Using English fonts in Windows 7 with Chinese local setting

Windows 7 comes with Lucida Console and Consolas as its default console fonts, but I find no option to enable either of them when my location is set to China. After a few tries, I managed to get them via the following steps:

  1. Right click the console icon and go to the default menu item;
  2. Set the default code page to '437 OEM';
  3. Switch to the font tab, and change the font to Lucida Console, press OK button;
  4. Restart the console and go to the code page setting back to '936 Chinese'.