How/Where to get standard TrueType fonts (now solved!)

[Tez]

john d. herron wrote:
> Thanks, Tez, for your very clear and concise explanation, which worked
> beautifully - and thanks to Ian Rose, as well.
> Since Adept Help does not work on my box, I'm going to file this one
> away for future reference.
> As a long-time Windows user, small-business owner and VB programmer
> who has for the past eighteen or so months been working (first with
> SuSE 9.2 and now with Kubuntu 6.06, which I much prefer) at migrating
> everything to Linux, I'm still very much a greenhorn, used to working
> with GUI apps and tools and not yet much at home with a console or CLI.
> So if there's an easier, or better, way to look for and find/install
> software, I'd love to learn more about it.
> john
>
(Long reply, but worth a read)
In my experience working with the CLI is easier then working with some
GUIs (especially Adept). The good things about Linux though is choice, I
don't like Adept, so I don't use it (I use Synaptic as the GUI). But if
you just want to do a quick search, of you know the name of the package
you want to install, the CLI is best.
apt-cache
apt-cache is used to search the package cache, i.e. searching for
packages, getting the description of a package and some other things
too. E.g. The command
apt-cache search arial
shows the output:
roxen-fonts-iso8859-2 - Extra fonts for roxen
msttcorefonts - Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

>From there you get the package name and a short description. If you want
a more detailed description you'll run:
apt-cache show msttcorefonts
the output shows:
Package: msttcorefonts
Priority: optional
Section: multiverse/x11
Installed-Size: 164
Maintainer: Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 1.2ubuntu3
Depends: wget (>= 1.9.1-4), cabextract (>= 0.1-2), xutils (>= 4.0.2),
debconf (>= 1.2.0), defoma, debianutils (>= 1.7)
Recommends: x-ttcidfont-conf
Filename: pool/multiverse/m/msttcorefonts/msttcorefonts_1.2ubuntu3_all.deb
Size: 22540
MD5sum: d858e7d7cd245f1107009d418671b478
Description: Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts
 This package allows for easy installation of the Microsoft True Type
 Core Fonts for the Web including:
[etc...]

Then to install the package, rather than opening Adept (or any other
GUI) and waiting for it to load, you just type:
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
type in your password, and apt-get will download the package, with it's
dependences if not already installed and will then install the package
for you.
You can find out more about the commands (or any command) by looking at
the "man pages", you get to them by typing "man [command]". So you can
type "man apt-cache" and "man apt-get" to find out about apt-cache and
apt-get respectively.
Unlike with windows, anything you can do with a GUI, you can do from the
console. From editing text files to playing music files (or streams) or
videos (as long as you have an X server running). It's well worth you
diving in and playing with the CLI, if you're worried about possibly
damaging your system from the powerful CLI, don't be. As long as you
don't add "sudo" before a command, the worst it can do is delete your
users files, and to make sure you don't even do that, just create a new
user to work on the CLI with until you're more confident, the user won't
be able to use sudo at all unless you set that up yourself.

So have a poke around the CLI and get more comfortable with it, because
that's where the power of Linux is.

Tez