Fonts

Install (Powerline) fonts in Chrome OS in dev mode

Suppose you want to install some extra fonts (eg Powerline fonts) to spice up your Crosh Window (eg for Zsh + agnoster). You might be surprised that after following a tutorial (even those specific to Chrome OS) that places the fonts in your home directory fc-cache -vf does not pick up your new fonts despite the existence of /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf (and even if you manually specify the directory, you will still run into problems with the powerline symbols).

The reason is that the Chrome OS devs have patched the fontconfig to disable loading files from the home directory.

So how can you install fonts? The solution is to install to /usr/local/share/fonts. This location is not in the default fontconfig config so you need to add

<dir>/usr/local/share/fonts</dir>

to /etc/fonts/local.conf

If it complains about being readonly you should remount the partition in rw mode: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton/issues/582#issuecomment-32581668

Unfortunately /etc/fonts/local.conf will be reset on update, so alternatives are very welcome!