The Ubuntu Font Family Is Now Available In Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (Officially)

The new Ubuntu font ("Ubuntu Font Family") has just been uploaded to the Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat official repositories and is now shipped with both Ubuntu desktop and netbook editions according to the Ubuntu meta and Netbook meta changelogs:

Refreshed dependencies
* Added ttf-ubuntu-font-family to desktop

Update: the font will be shipped with Kubuntu 10.10 too.

The font however is not used by default on any Ubuntu flavor! As bug 649616 points out, the decision on making this the default font for Ubuntu 10.10 has not been taken yet.

Licence

The Ubuntu Font Family has been released as a Libre font, licensed under the Ubuntu Font Licence 1.0:

Canonical are working with SFLC and SIL on a revision of the OFL with the intent of adopting that revision for a future version of the Ubuntu Font Family. This Ubuntu Font Licence serves as an interim licence until that is complete. Source

That's because the license still needs some clarifications.

How to download / install the Ubuntu font

If you're using Ubuntu 10.10 all you have to do is run an upgrade and the new Ubuntu font should be installed with the updates. Alternatively, you can install the font using the following command:

sudo apt-get install ttf-ubuntu-font-family

If you're not using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, you can download the Ubuntu Font Family as an archive or deb from HERE although the recommended way of getting the font is through the official PPA (still private, hopefully it will be made public soon) so you can get updates!

There's still work to be done!

The font is not ready for all the languages and there are missing glyphs for Arabic, Armenian, Georgian to name just a few. In case this will be made the default Ubuntu 10.10 font in the final release, the old font will be used for these languages. As a side note, the font name has been changed from "UbuntuBeta" to "Ubuntu" which means the font is no longer considered beta.


The Ubuntu Font Family will also be made available as a webfont which you'll be able to use on your website. It is considered to make it available on both http://font.ubuntu.com and on Google's Webfonts directory: http://code.google.com/webfonts

Update: you can now install the Ubuntu Font Family from a public PPA.