Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I’ve been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here’s the recipe:
Get the XFT_JHD_BRANCH of CVS Emacs, see XftGnuEmacs on the Emacs wiki, and this page from Deling Ren.
Get a further patch, from this mailing list post
Get the emacs-snapshot-debian directory from this arch repository and use it as the debian directory inside the Emacs source tree
Ubuntu, which has become one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions in recent years, launched its latest version on June 1 following months of intense testing. The new release is titled Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support), and has a specific emphasis on the needs of large organisations with both desktop and server versions.