Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

One thing I noticed when I was putting together the vaguely useful Ubuntu GTK1.2 Remix was that Ubuntu’s Dillo, by default, enables antialiasing in fonts. You can see it in the screenshots of the desktop; Dillo’s fonts — and by that I mean the fonts in the rendered page, not the interface since those are handled by GTK1.2 — are smoothed and appear a lot like a regular browser’s.

Ordinarily that’s a good thing, but with the intent being to knock down the graphical demands of a sparse Ubuntu system, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been a better idea to recompile it without the antialiasing effects. Dillo (or maybe I should say, the i18n-misc revision) makes that somewhat easy, since that is handled just through a configuration flag.

If you want to rebuild Dillo to remove antialiasing, which sounds counterintuitive, it’s very easy. Along the lines of the method for building software updates, here’s how to do it.

First, install a few preliminaries.

sudo aptitude install -y --without-recommends build-essential checkinstall

Next, get the standing dependencies for Dillo, courtesy of apt-get.

sudo apt-get build-dep dillo

You should be able to do that step, even if you don’t have Dillo installed already. Next, grab the patched source code for the i18n-misc version, and decompress it.

wget http://teki.jpn.ph/pc/software/dillo-0.8.6-i18n-misc-20070916.tar.bz2

and

tar jxvf dillo-0.8.6-i18n-misc-20070916.tar.bz2

Change into the directory that was created, and set up your configuration flags. For this example, I’ve made sure all the image handlers are enabled, but turned off things like antialiasing and ipv6.

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-tabs --disable-anti-alias --disable-ipv6 --enable-cookies --enable-png --enable-jpg --enable-gif --enable-ssl --disable-dlgui --enable-meta-refresh

You can adjust that as you see fit. There are some other flags available, and you can check them with ./configure --help | less.

When that finishes you’ll get a brief synopsis of the configuration setup; from there run make.

And when that finishes, you can use make install, or use sudo checkinstall, which is what I prefer since it spews forth a portable, reusable .deb file, which you can transplant or horde, as you like. I know, I recall from comments that checkinstall is a bit sloppy, but again, if it’s just for me, I can tolerate a little sloppiness.

Results are … even uglier than before, if you can believe that.

But it should be a teensy bit easier on a low-end system. You get all the regular Dillo i18n-misc goodness, without the burden of antialiasing all those fonts. (One note, if your first run pops up with unreadable garbage everywhere, double-check your font settings in Dillo’s options. Mine were set to some strange gothic font by default.)

If there’s ever another rebuild of the GTK1.2 remix, I’ll probably throw this on there, instead of the standard Ubuntu version. Might as well go crazy, and keep it as ugly as possible. 😉