With the Fonty Python font manager, you can organize your fonts into groups (called “pogs”), and install and uninstall these groups when you need them. When a pog is not installed, you won’t have the fonts it contains filling up your menus.

Fortunately modern Linux distributions have much better fonts and font tools available. From font creation/editing to font management, there are plenty of outstanding applications to help you in your quest for font nirvana.

The GNU/Linux desktop lacks a font manager for design work. Ideally, such a font manager should support currently used font formats, including TrueType, Type1, and OpenType, and allow sets of fonts to be activated on the fly, so that system memory is not choked with rarely used fonts. Until now, the closest to this ideal has been Fonty Python. Now, however, newcomer Fontmatrix has proved itself a contender for the role.

"I got bitten by trying to use Python 2.5 code that I originally wrote for a Debian system on my Gentoo box and it being angry with me. Rather than rewriting it for the short time left that Gentoo has Python 2.4 as the default, I decided to go for it now..."

Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language.

If you do your Debian package management from the command line, you are probably aware of utilities that search the cache of available programs, such as apt-cache, apt-file, and dpkg. Possibly, too, you have cursed the limited search information available in graphical interfaces like Synaptic, which does not extend much beyond searching for the description, name, versions, and dependencies.

Python programming is all the rage, because the language has such simple, clean syntax, is easy to learn and has lots of libraries available. But best of all, you're not limited to writing command-line applications. Python has at least four ways to make graphical apps, but today I'll concentrate on one: TkInter.

Developers will be introduced to Spring Python and will learn to develop powerful applications after applying concepts of Spring to the environment of Python. Readers will shown how to use the IoC or Dependency Injection container for Python. Using Jython, developers will be able to link Python and Java components together efficiently as well as learn to add security to their Python application.

Ubuntu offers a lot of fonts, in addition to the defaults installed, and the Microsoft msttcorefonts package, in its repositories. All these fonts mentioned here are provided as packages, which can easily installed using command line tools like apt-get or using Synaptic.