[plug] Anti-aliased fonts with Gnome2 on Debian

[Ryan]

Howdy Plug, 

I upgraded gnome2 to unstable yesterday for something to do and it all
slid down the wall in a dribbly mess.  So I reinstalled everything
gnome2 from ~kov and X (from source) and thought I'd give anti-aliased
fonts a go. 

I'm using metacity if it matters (anyone else notice its blatant
disregard for update-alternatives when you have no other window managers
installed?)

I'm running X 4.3.0 compiled from source on Debian - At one stage I had
anti-aliasing working ONLY when i did xterm -fa "blah mono".  Then after
some more fiddling that still works but takes about 10 seconds to crank
up when i run the command.  I'm using xfs-xtt 1.3.0.xf420-4 from woody
as the 1.3.0.xf430 one I tried kept offering up no fonts. 

The examples I've seen about AA appear to use the old(?) xfs-xtt config
files such as /etc/X11/Xftconfig and suggest things like: 

match edit antialias=1; 

while the xfs-xtt im using uses /etc/X11/fs-xtt/ and appears to be a
totally different format.  Are they really the old way or some
compeltely different way to do all this that I'm missing?

I can see all my true-type fonts when I look at the Gnome2 font config
panel (the one with the choice of application and desktop font
defaults), they are not anti-aliased but they are all there.  I also am
using the gdmgreeter and it looks like that is anti-aliased, just to rub
my plight in a little more.

I've also read that exporting GDK_USE_XFT=1 will get it going, but where
does one throw that when using gdm? ... testing from the console with
startx after exporting that line doesn't start gnome - just X with no
window manager and one xterm (i've got a few things broken here and
there don't I?) :)

I'm a little in awe of my propensity to progressively destroy config
files without recollection and thus find it hard to provide examples of
what I've done/tried/proven as I have not idea .. I've just been staring
at webpages and trying things for a few hours to no avail.

Can anyone whack some kind of clue into me? 

Thanks,

Ryan