2455+ Fonts
Source: dafont.com and theleagueofmoveabletype.com
Harvested: March 2010

This archive actually contains far more than 2455, between the different varities of some of the fonts, plus a few dozen more fonts that aren't considered 100% free so are not included in the 2455 count.  As with the GIMP brushes, install these with care; you can't exactly drop 2500 fonts indiscriminately into your system and expect GIMP and Inkscape and anything else that uses fonts to not notice or care.  Could definitely slow things down for you, so don't go crazy with this.

This font collection is solely responsible for this collection of multimedia "spare parts" not having been released ealier.  I had to personally sort through well over 4000 fonts and look at their licenses one by one.  I generally divided the resulting collection into categories that mirror the dafont.com categories, but with sub-directories marking them as FREE, NOTES, or RESTRICTED.

FREE = use them in any way you want, artistically.  They are free**. 

NOTES = contains notes (clearly named after the font with which they are associated) about a font.

RESTRICTED = fonts with an inordinate number of restrictions that are OK to use just on your personal projects.  After about 1500 fonts or so, I stopped bothering with these due to the time and mentail strain involved in trying to make sense of licenses.


INSTALL
-------

This differs from system to system, although a lot of modern desktops seem to make it pretty simple, like, click the font file, look at it, click the "install" button, done.  Launch a design application and the font should be there.

For bulk installs it may be easier to manually move the .ttf files over to 
/usr/share/fonts/TTF/    #for .ttf fonts
/usr/share/fonts/OTF/    #for .otf fonts
....and so on.

On Slackware, at least, you should then run:
bash$ su -c 'pkgtool'

and choose Setup
and then mark (with the spacebar) to run "05. fontconfig" and then hit RETURN.

This re-scans the font directory and makes sure the entire system knows the new fonts exist.


Enjoy! and be sure to read through the NOTES files and shoot an email to some of the artists.  I'm sure most of them would love to hear that you're digging the fonts they spent so much time working on.  Plus, there are some pretty hilarious and clever notes in there; think of them as easter eggs ;^)


xoxo
- the Secret Order of Linux Multimedia Sprinters



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footnote:
** this does not necessarily include (nor does it necessarily exclude) packing up the fonts into an .rpm or .deb and putting them in your repository, or packaging them on a cdrom and selling it, and so on.  For distribution legalities, you will need to do a lot of legal research and probably should contact the font authors themselves to get permission.