Bear in mind that the installation of a TrueType font server can be tricky business. Remember that the order that you issue the above commands is important. The font server must be started before X is started, otherwise you will run into problems. Be sure to read the FAQ file that came with the distribution, and the xfstt man page too. Many newer Linux versions come with this already working, so see if that's not already the case before worrying too much about it.
Colors Let's go back to our terminal window and try some more things.
While that window may not be pretty, and you may not do much of your best work in it, it demonstrates one interesting theme of X, the names of the colors. While not very precise, this is a nice way to remember the colors more easily than remembering a series of hexadecimal numbers. Note that color names are never case-sensitive. There are also some extremely useful utilities with names like xcolorsel and such. A more precise way of specifying colors is through the numerical definition.