[lug] Font problems again...

[Hugh Brown]

On Sat, 2004-09-04 at 00:45, John Dollison wrote:
> I've had several times now where KDE seems to have set all fonts to a size 
> of 0, so all text appears as tiny dots on all menus, icons, web browsers, 
> etc.  The only things not affected are the terminal windows, or the console 
> screens (if I press CTRL-ALT-F1 through F6).  I'm running Mandrake 10.0 / 
> KDE 3.2 / kernel 2.6.3 on a homebrew PC.  Sometimes a reboot fixes it, 
> sometimes not.
> 
> When I look in /var/log/syslog I see the following after booting up:
> 
> Sep 3 02:13 localhost xfs: Ignoring font path element 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/drakfont (unreadable)
> Sep 3 02:13 localhost xfs: Ignoring font path element 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/drakfont/Type1 (unreadable)
> Sep 3 02:13 localhost xfs: Ignoring font path element 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/drakfont/ttf (unreadable)
> Sep 3 02:13 localhost xfs: Ignoring font path element 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled (unreadable)
> Sep 3 02:13 localhost xfs: Ignoring font path element 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/pcf_drakfont:unscaled (unreadable)
> 
> When I go back a few days, I see this just before a shutdown:
> Sep 1 22:28 localhost fam[2713]: stat on ".fonts.cache-1.NEW" failed: No 
> such file or directory.
> 
> Indeed, when I checked the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ folder, I found that 
> none of those files or folders existed (although there are some other files 
> in the fonts/ folder).  So I'm guessing that's where the problem is; I need 
> to put some font files in the folder, unless there's some conf file I need 
> to fix to point to the correct files.  The only problem is, I don't know 
> what I'm doing.  A Google search turned up all kinds of stuff on missing 
> Linux fonts, but nothing that really seemed relevant to this problem.  Any 
> suggestions?
> 
> John
> 

It seems like fonts have a number of mechanisms put in place to manage
them these days.

I'd look at your rpm's to make sure that /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts is the
place that Mandrake is keeping fonts these days (e.g. rh9 uses the above
and /usr/share/fonts, debian uses /usr/lib/X11/fonts).

rpm -qa|grep -i font

Then rpm -ql the packages listed.  If the above path is the correct one,
then it's time to investigate tools like chkfontpath, xlsfonts,
fslsfonts, mkfontdir, mkfontdesc, ttmkfdir, etc.

On a redhat box, the startup script for xfs was informative.  I'm not
sure if mandrake use xfs as its font server, but I suspect it does.

Disclaimer: I'm no font guru, the above is just what I would play with
if I were troubleshooting this for myself.

HTH,

Hugh