Windows 7: A Futile Attempt to Move the Fonts Folder

In Windows 7, I tried to move the C:\Windows\Fonts folder to another location.  I did it because I didn't want to lose fonts, if I decided to install additional ones.  At the default C:\Windows\Fonts location, they wouldn't survive reinstallation of the system.  An alternative was to save copies of additional fonts at a different location and copy them to C:\Windows\Fonts after installing a new system.

I found no guidance on this process of moving the Fonts folder.  I copied everything from the C: folder to the X: folder.  Then I searched the registry, changed the references in my .reg file to the new location (X:\Cache\Fonts) in the two locations where I found references to C:\Windows\Fonts, and ran the reg file.  The system rebooted without a problem.  I tried to delete C:\Windows\Fonts, but that gave me a message:

Folder Access Denied
You need permission to perform this action.
You require permission from TrustedInstaller to make changes to this folder.

I searched on that and found advice to go into right-click Properties > Security tab > Advanced > Owner tab.  There was no such tab for C:\Windows\Fonts, but there was for C:\Windows.  I went to Edit, changed it to Administrator, and checked "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects."  When I clicked Apply, I got another message:

Windows Security
You do not have permission to read the contents of directory C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6.  Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control?
All permissions will be replaced if you press Yes.

The answer seemed obvious, and that made me suspicious.  I searched on that and saw that Microsoft advised to just go ahead with this, in a couple of contexts, so I did.  It took a while to change permissions for everything in C:\Windows.  Next, I got a message telling me to close and reopen properties to see the updated situation, so I did that.  Still looking at Properties for C:\Windows, I went into Security tab > Edit.  I highlighted Administrators and then clicked Allow for Full Control.  Now I got a message saying, "You need permission to perform this action" -- permission from Administator, which I was.  I found other advice that seemed to recommend these two commands:

takeown /f C:\Windows\Fonts
cacls C:\Windows\Fonts /G Administrator:F

But when I then tried to delete, I got another error message:

Folder In Use
The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program.
Close the folder or file and try again.

Not surprising, since the system itself was obviously using fonts, though it would seem like it could have been just as happy using them from X: as from C:.  I thought I had rebooted since making the registry change, so this time I booted into Safe Mode and tried the deletion there.  No joy.  I selected all fonts and tried deleting them individually, and that got me down to a selected core of 81 fonts, including essentials like Sylfaen Regular and Utsaah.  I was tempted to boot into Ubuntu and wipe out the Fonts folder that way, but instead I gave up:  I went to X:\Cache\Fonts and copied all of the fonts back to C:\Windows\Fonts.  I couldn't remember exactly how many there had been, but the count didn't seem the same, so I rebooted into Normal mode to run System Restore.  My hunch was correct:  some fonts were not displaying correctly.  After System Restore, all was lovely, so I moved on to the next part of my life.

Ubuntu 10.04: Adding Fonts from Windows and Elsewhere

It is possible to beef up the set of available fonts in Ubuntu.  The Ubuntu wiki describes several ways of doing this, including doing a search for "font" in Synaptic and downloading from there.  One package that can be downloaded that way contains Microsoft free web fonts (presently called ttf-mscorefonts-installer).  According to the wiki, fonts can also be installed manually in /home/[username]/.fonts (for the specific user) or in /usr/share/fonts (for all users).  An advantage of using the /home folder, if there is only one user of a computer, is that the fonts can then be preserved through Ubuntu reinstallations, if the /home folder is placed on a separate partition.

The wiki indicates that fonts can be simply copied, or dragged and dropped, into those folders.  There is also the occasional suggestion, however, that it is then necessary to enter a command, such as "sudo fc-cache -f -v," to enable the system to recognize them.  Following a source that I cannot presently identify, I checked System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts > Application Font and saw that Microsoft fonts (e.g., Tahoma) were not included.  So I copied the full set of TrueType fonts (not others) from C:\Windows\Fonts (on a Windows XP machine) to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts.  (Note that this was the name I gave the folder.  It contained several hundred fonts -- far more than those provided in the free msttcorefonts set that was available from Microsoft via Synaptic.)

I did not run that suggested follow-up command ("sudo fc-cache -f -v").  Moreover, I did this copying while the Fonts dialog was open.  There were also several hundred fonts in this set.  These factors, and/or others that I cannot identify, caused the system font -- the one that appears everywhere around windows and in menu commands -- to become converted to empty, unreadable rectangles (or boxes, as some people called them, or squares).  In other words, with a few simple maneuvers I was able to convert my new Ubuntu installation into something that was almost completely useless.  Readable text still appeared on the command line in a Terminal session, fortunately, and that is what ultimately helped me get out of this situation.

It seems there were several different bugs that contained or led to this problem of the letters on the screen being replaced by empty boxes, and several solutions that worked for different people.  The one that worked for me was to remove that msttcorefonts folder back to a different drive and then run three commands:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libcairo2 libpango1.0-common
sudo fc-cache -fs
sudo update-pangox-aliases

I am not sure the third command was necessary.  Although I was focused on entering the commands properly, it seemed to me, in passing, that everything was back in shape after the second command.

Once the system was fixed, I made a backup, and then I tried again.  This time, I made sure the System > Preferences > Appearance > Font dialog was closed.  I renamed my msttcorefonts folder to be .fonts, used "sudo nautilus" to move it to /home/ray/.fonts, and then typed "sudo fc-cache -f -v" (above) to make it be recognized.  Once again, however, I had those blank squares in place of the system font.  I started to repeat the fixing procedure just described, but I didn't even have to enter the commands; merely removing the new .fonts folder from /home/ray was enough to give the system relief.  I gave up on this idea of importing the full set of Windows fonts (at least for now), and contented myself with downloading a number of font sets via Synaptic:
ttf-mscorefonts-installer, sun-java6-fonts, ttf-sil-gentium, ttf-dustin, and ttf-georgewilliams.  The attempt to bring over those hundreds of Microsoft fonts would have to await another day.

Tweaking Ubuntu 10.04

I had upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  Now I wanted to make some adjustments.  For this purpose, I would be drawing upon the first and second lists of adjustments I had made when I had installed 9.10.

The first of those other things was to install a PAE-enabled 10.04 kernel, so that I would have access to all of my system's RAM.  I also found that VMware Workstation 7.0 was requiring me to enter my serial number.  I had not entered it after installing it on 9.10; I had just been using the trial serial number.  Now, unfortunately, Workstation was not cooperating:  it was saying "Unknown error entering serial number."  The solution to this problem was to run Workstation as root (i.e., type "sudo vmware" at the Terminal prompt) and enter the serial number there.

Since I was doing an upgrade of a previous installation, I did not have to reinstall packages, but I did have a problem with Software Sources.  I have described that one in a separate post.  (Even if I had needed to reinstall packages, the "installed-software" trick described in the lists of adjustments (above) would have made short work of it.)  On my laptop, I was doing the same upgrade, and there I made some problems for myself when I had to interrupt the upgrade.  Here on the desktop, the next task was (as described in separate posts) to try to get the printing and scanning features of my Brother MFC-7340 printer working from within Ubuntu.  After doing that, I tackled a problem that I had wanted to solve for years:  how to import the list of AutoCorrect entries that I had created in Microsoft Word into OpenOffice.org Writer, running on Ubuntu.  That took some time, but then I was able to get back to the project of working through those notes from previous installations.

The upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 had preserved much of the configuration I had already set up.  So as I worked through the Ubuntu tweaking steps described in one of my previous posts, I had to deal with only a fraction of the issues addressed there.  One was to prevent icons for mounted drives from appearing on the desktop.  That called for Terminal:  “gconf-editor” > /apps/nautilus/desktop > unclick volumes_visible.  But it was already unclicked, and yet I did have icons for mounted drives visible on the desktop.  I went into Applications > System Tools > Ubuntu Tweak > Desktop Icon Settings and clicked Show desktop icons and left everything else unchecked, but this made no difference.  I tried again, this time using “sudo gconf-editor.”  Ah, yes.  The volumes_visible box was checked for root.  Unchecking it removed the icons from the desktop.

I had not noticed, but somewhere along the line, I had evidently installed nautilus-open-terminal via Synaptic, or possibly it came installed by default.  As its name suggested, this tool added a right-click (context menu) option in Nautilus, "Open in Terminal."  Unlike Windows Explorer, this option was only available for folders in the file listing in Nautilus -- in the right pane, that is, not in the left pane that would typically show the folder tree.  In that left pane, this and other options were absent.

Had another little problem.  During the upgrade to 10.04, the Firefox icon changed, on the left-side (formerly top) panel, to a red do-not-enter or not-allowed kind of icon; and in Applications > Internet, it changed to a grey question-mark box.  I fixed this by going to the panel, right-clicking on Applications > Edit Menus > Internet > Firefox > Properties, clicking on the icon, and selecting /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png.  Speaking of Firefox, I wanted Ubuntu to open Firefox and Google Chrome on startup.  I wanted to add these to a script that would run at startup, since I suspected that I would be coming up with other things that I wanted to have happen at startup too.  It seemed pretty technical – beyond my current ability, anyway – but it looked like I might be able to just write a script and put it into /etc./init.d.  I typed “sudo gedit” and then created a file called /etc./init.d/a_startup_script.sh.  I put, into it, the line that I got from e.g., right-clicking on Applications and choosing Edit Menus > Applications > Internet > Firefox > Properties:  “firefox %u.”  I saved it and typed “chmod +x /etc./init.d/a_startup_script.sh.”  Then I rebooted.  This achieved nothing.  So creating a general-purpose startup script remained a goal for the future.

I also went down Gizmo’s Freeware list of tweaks.  I had already done most of the ones I wanted, but there were a few others.  One was to install Windows TrueType fonts in Ubuntu.  I decided to extend their advice somewhat.  I took a look at System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts.  I could see that a lot of Windows fonts were not present on the list there.  So in Windows XP, I went to C:\Windows\Fonts.  I selected and copied everything to another, temporary folder called UbuFonts.  In UbuFonts, I sorted by file type and deleted the ones that were not TTF files.  Back in Ubuntu, I typed “sudo nautilus” and went to /usr/share/fonts/truetype.  It already had a folder called msttcorefonts, but with only a fraction of the fonts that I had just copied from C:\Windows\Fonts to UbuFonts, and the font files there seemed older and smaller.  I made a backup copy of the msttcorefonts folder and then copied everything from UbuFonts into /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts.  Now System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts had a much wider selection.  I changed the fonts to Tahoma 10 and the monospace to Courier 10.  Tahoma allowed me to see more information on each line onscreen.

Another tweak from Gizmo called for some playing around with Compiz.  This was a bad idea, as described in a separate post.  Another tweak of interest was to clean up the GRUB boot menu.  I typed “uname -r” and saw that I was using the 2.6.32-22-generic-pae kernel.  In Synaptic, I searched for linux-image, clicked at the top of the left-hand column to sort by those that were installed, and marked for removal all numbered items other than that kernel.  In this case, that included just two items:  linux-image-2.6.31-21-generic-pae and linux-image-2.6.32-22.generic (i.e., not pae).  I did another search for linux-headers and marked all non-2.6.32-22-generic-pae items there too.  In this case, trying to remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22 threatened to remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22-generic-pae as well; but I wanted to keep that, so I didn’t remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22.  On restart, I saw that GRUB now listed just the 2.6.32-22-generic-pae kernel and its recovery mode, along with memtest and Windows XP (it was a dual-boot machine).  I went back into Ubuntu without a problem.  I did later have a VMware problem that might have been related to this, though.

Gizmo also pointed me toward a number of recommended freeware apps.  These were for the KDE (not GNOME) desktop.  I thought it might be time to try KDE, if only to check out these programs.  One was the Wally wallpaper changer, which I installed through Synaptic.  Getting Wally (and the whole KDE desktop) involved a total of 91 files.  Other interesting pieces of Gizmo-recommended software I got through Synaptic:  gtk-recordMyDesktop and Dolphin file manager.  Downloaded directly from creators’ websites, I got Wink, FreeFile Sync, and Parted Magic.  I did consider using Dropbox as well, because of its good reviews (by e.g., PC Magazine, Online Backup Tools, Laptop, and alternativeTo; but I decided that Windows Live Sync had important advantages even though I would have to run it in a virtual machine when I was booted into Ubuntu.

(Note:  a few days later -- possibly the first time I tried it after installing KDE -- Google Desktop search was no longer responding to its default Ctrl-Ctrl hotkey.  That is, its Quick Search Box was not coming up.  Something I saw on some webpage, as I was trying to fix that problem, made me wonder whether the KDE installation was to blame.  A tip that fixed it was to open the Google Desktop Search preferences and change the hotkey to Ctrl-F1.)

The last thing to do, in this round of tweaking, was to clean out unnecessary stuff from the drive on which I had installed Ubuntu, so that I could make a backup image in case I needed to reinstall – so that I could just restore the image, that is, instead of having to go back through all these steps.  This, I thought, called for something like the TreeSize utility that I had used in Windows to see where I might have files or folders taking up huge amounts of space.  Among what seemed to be several possibilities, I found an actual Linux version of TreeSize, so I downloaded that – but I also discovered Ubuntu’s Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer, whose Treemap Chart was especially interesting.  These revealed that my Ubuntu installation was not presently very large, so I didn’t have to worry too much about shrinking it for this particular image.  It also revealed that by far the largest space hog, within that installation, was the Google Desktop index of stuff on my hard drive, at 5.2GB.  I did see that the Google Chrome cache was also taking 400MB.  I went into Chrome’s Settings (the wrench icon at the upper-right corner) > Options but didn’t see any way to control that, other than to just clear the cache.  I decided to leave it for now, and changed some other settings while I was there.  And that was it.  Ubuntu 10.04 was tweaked, at least for now.