LV Fonts in openSUSE: Real vs VM

[Cepera]

I use LV2009 with openSUSE 11.1. The OS is installed natively on my laptop and in VM player on my desktop (downloaded from here: http://www.tuxdistro.com/torrents-details.php?id=1423). On both installations, I configured LabVIEW fonts to be default, size 12. While on the real installation the fonts look reasonably well (given that LV does not support font antialiasing), on the VM installation they look much worse. The consequence is that I cannot develop my UIs under VM and expect them to look the same when deployed to a target computer. Attached are two screenshots illustrating this problem. Any advice on what I can do in order to have the VM look match that of the real installation?

Thanks,

Sergey

[AdamKemp]

LabVIEW should not behave differently in a VM than it would on raw hardware (in fact, my development Linux box that I use for LabVIEW development runs in a VM, and fonts look fine in it). The difference must be in the installed OS. There is probably some key difference between the two distributions. Maybe some fonts aren't installed in the VM or something. Figure out what the difference is and you should be able to make it look the same.

[Cepera]

I thought that LabVIEW installed its own fonts. If that's not the case, can you tell me what fonts LV uses as default on Linux/openSUSE? Thanks!

[AdamKemp]

I think it's "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--*-100-X-Y-*-*-iso8859-1" (where X and Y are your DPI settings, or 75 if you tell LabVIEW to use pixel font sizes in Tools->Options->Environment). I know, fonts are crazy in Linux.

Now that I think about it, I bet you're suffering from an annoying bug in SuSE that used to make LabVIEW abort on launch. We fixed that in 2009, but now you end up with ugly fonts instead of aborting. The CAR had these steps listed to fix your SuSE install:

Update the following packages:
xorg-x11-fonts
xorg-x11-fonts-core

Both need to be at least version 7.3-70.2. These can be updated with the "Online Update" tool in SuSE 11, and they are listed under the "recommended" updates with the summary of "x11: Fix for broken font rendering in legacy applications".

[Cepera]

Adam,

You are absolutely right! My VM installation only had xorg-x11-fonts-core package. After I installed xorg-x11-fonts, LabVIEW fonts became identical to those on the Linux computer.

Thanks a lot!!

Sergey