Improving font rendering on Ubuntu
I did not like the default font rendering in Ubuntu.

I found a patch to freetype2, that gives you a lot more flexibility over the font rendering, and does a decent job mimicking the rendering in OSX or Windows.

I found instructions here.
The remainder of this post is copy and paste:
 - Download freetype 2.4.8 from freetype.org and unzip it somewhere.
- Download the infinality .tar.gz file, and unzip it somewhere.
- cd to the freetype-2.4.8 directory from a terminal and run these commands (edit the paths to match where you unzipped): 
patch -p1 < /path/to/your/extracted/files/freetype-add-subpixel-hinting-infinality-20111117-1.patch 
patch -p1 < /path/to/your/extracted/files/freetype-enable-subpixel-hinting-infinality-20100909-1.patch
patch -p1 < /path/to/your/extracted/files/freetype-entire-infinality-patchset-20111117-1.patch
./configure
make
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/freetype-infinality/ sudo
find . -name libfreetype.so.6.8.0 -exec mv {} /usr/lib/freetype-infinality/ \;
cd /usr/lib/freetype-infinality ln -s libfreetype.so.6.8.0 libfreetype.so.6
Then look at the README file for instructions on where to put the configuration files.

http://blog.adamdklein.com/?cat=17