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Someone suggested that timidity is not up to it when it comes to being a nice midi synth for use with Rosegardes. I investigated ways to improve its sound by using the FluidR3_GM.sf2 soundfont which can be found in the package repositories of many distributions these days.

You will need admin privileges to do the following. On Red Hat based distros you are not always set up to use sudo, you might have to su to a privileged shell, instead.

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First install the soundfont

sudo apt-get install FluidR3_GM.sf2
or
sudo yum install FluidR3_GM.sf2 (if you're on a Red Hat based distro)

Other people you're on your own.

You will find it in /usr/share/sounds/sf2/ (Ubuntu, possibly all debian derivs)
or
/usr/share/soundfonts/ (redhat)

Then open /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg

sudo gedit /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg

There will be a line at the bottom of the config file which reads

source freepats.cfg

replace that with the following

(Ubuntu)

dir /usr/share/sounds/sf2/
soundfont FluidR3_GM.sf2

(Red Hat)

dir /usr/share/soundfonts/
soundfont FluidR3_GM.sf2

save the file

And then in a terminal

sudo /etc/init.d/timidity restart
for Ubuntu and friends

For Fedora you might need to install timidity and set it up to run as a daemon as it is done in Ubuntu. This is beyond my knowledge. Perhaps you know how to do this? I know that CCRMA has timidity in its list of applications. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/soundapps.html.

SOM