Last night I got really frustrated getting some basic functionality out of a new notebook for my friend. I am sitting here, configuring and working around stuff, while a beautiful Sunday is outside the windows.

Apart from the typical ‘won’t suspend’, ‘oh that’s a wonky pulse audio daemon’, ‘oh you need to install these fishy codecs’, ‘oh CUPS hates people’, ‘yea gstreamer doesn’t do DVD menus’ I had two extra ones that brought me to my knees.

For some reason Brasero, now the default audio CD burner used by Banshee insists on using the reverse order of the tracks to burn them and gives no obvious way to change this. This is a stupid trivial issue, hardly something a maintainer would mark as a showstopper in bugzilla, yet makes the whole toolchain useless for my friend.

The other grief was her generic mp3 player. We don’t really have the infrastructure to allow huge amounts of people to contribute information about their devices to have other people have theirs work out of the box or have data to make a good buy decision.

HAL and the FDI description files is a great technology. But I have been very frustrated last night to see my friend’s generic el cheapo mp3 player not supported only because a description file was missing. A generic usb storage device and I coudln’t see it in Banshee, nor could I just drag and drop files onto a Nautilus window (since when did Banshee lose this capability?). Sadly not even getting the FDI clobbed up didn’t end my horror.

I would so love to see a social site around this, similar to Ohloh. Earning kudos for providing FDI files for all the devices I have. Creating a timeline of what devices I have owned over the years. Seeing what devices my friends use and their Linux support status. Submitting custom icons for specific devices (seeing all the great icons in gnome-icon-theme-extras rot without being used makes me sad).

I must say I’m happy about what I picked for this year’s Hackweek. My back and neck have not enjoyed the hackweek, but all the other body parts did While I am far from finished, I am surprised how much can be done on a font in a week (around 60 hours I would reckon) if I don’t need to worry about anything else.

The glyph coverage is better than what I planned. The typeface is stronger to what I sketched out and I hate there is no programmatic way to get smaller widths or alter x-height. Nevertheless I think the project was a success.

People keep asking what tools I use – Fontforge is the master tool for all this, it’s really packed with features. But I wouldn’t be able to draw a thing in it (even though it does have a large palette of tools), so all the glyphs have been constructed in Inkscape. Big thanks to George Williams not only for the amazing tool, but also for great documentation.

I’ve realized over the week just how much work needs to be done to create a full font family. I always considered the prices to be quite high, but this stuff is years of experience and endless tweaking. I know I’ll never try anything bigger than a display face/headliner in this life. That said, I think now is the perfect time to ask you to come forward and join the fun. Lots of international glyphs I have no idea about need to be done, the spacing fixed, etc. Check out the font from opensuse-art SVN and play with it, improve it. Discussions should take place on the opensuse-art mailing list. Thank you.

Also a big thanks to Novell for a great opportunity to Free openSUSE and Linux in general one step further.

• Download Fifth Leg v 0.1 in OpenType format.

I screwed up with the proportions and the font is way to strong, but I’m liking the process. You can check out the progress in opensuse-art SVN.

I may be taking on something bigger than I can ever finish in a month and hardly in a hackweek, but it is both fun unknown territory and something that is needed badly.

openSUSE uses a rather spiffy Cholla header font by Sibylle Hagmann. The problem is it isn’t a Free nor free font^*, making it hard for the community to produce openSUSE branded material. So you guessed it, I’d like to design an original type to replace it. Apart from Lingdings (bullets font for OpenOffice Impress) I’ve never done this. Partly because the font designer and even type setting community is very pedantic, deeply following a strict set of rules. Good fonts come from a lot of experience. So be warned, this is pure amateurism, a font designed by a non-type-designer.

To help me stay focused, I’ve come up with these attributes I’d like the font to have.

• Simplistic, technical sans serif.
• Heavy. Rounded.
• Will not do normal weight, this is a headline font. ‘Close’ to Cholla Wide Bold.
• Only basic latin glyph coverage for now (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
• Low contrast.
• Open Font License.
• I don’t aim to kern the font properly this week.

Thanks Garrett for suggesting the name.