GNOME and Bitstream recently got together to make some Free fonts for OpenSource projects. The effort resulted in the high quality BitstreamVera fontset, which can be downloaded and installed on any system you want. The set consists of the following TrueType fonts:

• Bitstream Vera Serif: a serif font most similar to Georgia.
• Bitstream Vera Sans: a very pleasant sans-serif font. It is similar to Verdana/Helvetica, but wider and warmer.
• Bitstream Vera Sans Mono: a gorgeous monospace font slightly similar to Terminal.

Information about the BitstreamVera fonts and downloads can be found See the GNOME's announcement. Most distributions should have a package for the BitstreamVera fontset. If yours doesn't, see FontNotes for links and howtos on how to install them manually. If you want to check to see if they are installed correctly and how they look on your computer, run xfontsel, select bitstream from the fndry (foundry) dropdown and bitstream vera from the fmly (family) dropdown. For the following distributions, the package is called:

• DebianLinux: ttf-bitstream-vera
• RedHat: bitstream-vera-fonts
• Slackware: in 9.1, ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10-noarch-2; since 10.0, has been subsumed into x11-fonts-scale-n.x.y-noarch-z

The BitstreamVera 1.10 family contains only characters from iso_8859_15(7)/Western Europe charsets, lacking support for characters such as "ā" (A macron, used for example in Māori). A fork exists which adds many characters from other European languages (and more) while remaining true to the feel and proportion of the original. It is called DejaVu, because modifications of BitstreamVera have to be distributed under a different name per the license.

The wiki uses the BitstreamVera fonts if you have them installed.