Red Hat recently released a set of free fonts designed to be a metrically-exact replacement for the Microsoft Core TrueType fonts. Installing fonts on Linux, however, has not always been the easiest of tasks so Tectonic dug around a little to make a simple guide to installing these, and other, fonts on most flavours of Linux.

The first thing to do is get you hands on the fonts you want to install. Red Hat’s Liberation fonts can be found here. These are TrueType fonts so they will need to be installed in the appropriate folder.

Once downloaded and uncompressed:

sudo gunzip liberation-fonts-ttf.tar.gz

and

sudo tar -xvf liberation-fonts-ttf.tar

create a folder for them. We created the directory /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation and copied the Liberation fonts into that directory.

Next we changed the ownership of the .ttf files to root with the command:

sudo chown root.root *.ttf

And, finally, we regenerated the font cache:

sudo fc-cache

The font cache would also be regenerated when you rebooted your machine but this is Linux and most of us prefer to enjoy not having to reboot the whole time.

Once this is done your new fonts should be installed and ready to go. Karl Fischer has done a nice comparison of these fonts and the Microsoft Core fonts they replace. Thanks to GrumpyMole.