Weekly - issue 47

Weekly
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How to Install Fonts on Debian Linux 12

The GNOME / KDE fonts manager provide a user-friendly way to manage and install fonts, we will show how to install fonts manually.

For most uses, we’ll install TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) fonts.

Fonts will be place into:

  • /usr/local/share/fonts

    System-Wide

  • ~/.local/share/fonts

    User-Specific

  • ~/.fonts

    User-Specific

The manual installation process:

  1. Make sure the fontconfig package is installed

    command -v fc-cache > /dev/null || sudo apt-get install -y fontconfig

    The commands fc-cache and fc-list come from the package.

  2. Download the font

  3. Make sure the font files have the permission 644 (-rw-r--r--)

    chmod 644 <font file>

# OR

chmod 644 <font directory>/*

  4. Copy font files to the system-wide or the user-specific directory

    If using the user-specific font directories, they don’t exist by default, we’ll use one of them and create it:

    mkdir -p ~/.local/share/fonts

# OR

mkdir ~/.fonts

    If the font have multiple files, we can create a subdirectory, then copy font files to it.

  5. Build font information cache files

    # No root privileges required
fc-cache -f

    Normally Debian is watching these font directories and will automatically generate the cache, we don’t need to run the command.

  6. Check the result

    fc-list | grep -i <font name>

    For example:

    fc-list | grep -i dejavu

First Impressions with Google’s Gemini

Gemini is a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) developed by Google.

  1. Visual Question Answering (VQA)

    • Ask “How many coins do I have?” in an image

      Pass: Gemini, LLaVA, BakLLaVA, Qwen-VL, and CogVLM

      Failed: GPT-4 with Vision

    • Ask if the LMM could identify which movie was featured in an image

      Pass: Gemini, Qwen-VL and GPT-4 with Vision

      Failed: LLaVA, BakLLaVA, and CogVLM

    • Ask “What is the price of Pastrami Pizza?” in a menu

      Pass: Gemini, CogVLM, and GPT-4 with Vision

      Failed: LLaVA, BakLLaVA, and Qwen-VL

  2. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

    Ask “Read the serial number.” in an image of a tire.

    Pass: Qwen-VL, CogVLM, and GPT-4 with Vision

    Failed: Gemini, LLaVA and BakLLaVA

  3. Document OCR

    • Ask “Read text from the picture.”

      Pass: Qwen-VL, CogVLM, and GPT-4 with Vision

      Failed: Gemini (almost correct)

    • Ask “How much tax did I pay?” in a receipt image

      Pass: Gemini

  4. Object Detection

    • Ask “Find the dog.” in an image

      Pass: Qwen-VL, CogVLM

      Failed: Gemini

    • Look for the Christmas tree in an image

      Pass: Qwen-VL, CogVLM

      Failed: Gemini