I set out to see if the Zonbu can replace my Desktop PC for all my day-to-day tasks.
Tonight I’m trying to improve the avatar that appears next to my name in the comments. It needs to be much clearer that it’s Mr. Zonbu and not the Zonbu company that is posting.
I’m not artist but I should be able to whip something up. I certainly could in Adobe Photoshop.
Then again, I could also buy 2 full Zonbu systems with 1 year subscriptions just for the cost of Photoshop alone.
This afforded me a great opportunity to see how well the Image Workshop option on the Zonbu performs…
Fontless?
I’m doing something basic, I just want to add some text to my image. In this case I’m adding a stylized “Mr.” to the Zonbu logo.
In the course of attempting this I couldn’t find any fonts in the Gimp.
I don’t know how to use the Gimp so I looked up their online documentation and did some searching. Apparently almost any font type that you can throw at it is supported. You just put the fonts in a specific path and they will be available to you.
What does Zonbu include for fonts?
I know the Zonbu must include a number of nice default fots, or Firefox and all the other apps wouldn’t look so polished.
In fact, I just checked the word processing application, and OO Writer had a lovely list of fonts available.
I’m not going to go prospecting for fonts, and neither is my Mom. If the fonts are there, then the path needs to be properly set in the Gimp.
Just to make sure I wasn’t missing something in the Gimp interface, I did check the location that is configured by default, and there are no visible or hidden files present.
Conclusion
As I said in an earlier post, I think the current software release is a good start but stuff like this is where the rubber meets the road.
As a vendor, you can get positive one-off reviews and press coverage without addressing things like this, but for someone to use the product day-to-day this stuff is critical.
I look forward to an update automatically arriving soon to make my fonts appear in the Gimp.
When they do, and the system tells me in the release notes that it has been fixed, I will update the avatar.
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
Somehow, somewhere down in the Zonbu labs, I’m 100% sure at least one person is grinning and clapping his/her hands with every new post you make. Their very own (and free..) alpha-tester, what more could they ask?
It’s difficult to start something up, but seriously.. This is almost too painful to NOT notice when running through your machine. Doesn’t anybody do the ‘noob’ tests anymore?
[…] That being said, the one app I am missing is something like Putty or any SSH client with a phone book. Having to drop to a shell to SSH, which I’ve been doing alot of lately, is a bit annoying. Other than that, the current app list is good. Although the IM client needs an update and there are some polish issues within various other apps that hopefully this “final” release will address (fonts not set up properly in Gimp for example). […]