= Preamble = Fedora 7 has been without issue for me thus far.Kudos to all involved. = Problem = Shutdown machine without notice of any problems. Booted up next day and Xorg, and in turn KDM wouldn't load. /var/log/messages was quiet but both /var/log/kdm.log and /var/log/Xorg.0.log showed: could not open default font 'fixed' = Solution = I eventually found out that I had an entry in my xorg.cong:Files FontPath "/usr/local/share/fonts" commenting that out fixed the problem. = Cuase = According to the Google cache of the Xorg wiki (which was down at the time), "The use of the font server xfs is deprecated due to several bugs in it. It is recommended that the Xserver loads the fonts directly." So I'm guessing KDE assumes that font paths are setup via xorg.cong. I had attempted to add ttf fonts via KDE's control center (it did ask for root password). Incidentally, I did notice that that did not add the fonts in question, so I went back to how I normally add fonts, using fonts:/Personal (that worked as normal). I'm not sure what a possible resolution is, but I think it's fair to expect people to attempt to use Control Center to add a font. (although using fonts:/Personal is better)

According to the Google cache of the Xorg wiki (which was down at the time), "The use of the font server xfs is deprecated due to several bugs in it. It is recommended that the Xserver loads the fonts directly."

On Sunday, August 05, 2007 4:56 pm Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Right. Fedora is dropping XFS (X font server, not the filesystem) by > default in the next version so this problem is going away. Well, that sucks. I've found Xorg is far more flaky with the fonts without xfs... When I ran Debian, I used to get crashes due to the system not being able to find fonts with alarming frequency.

On Sunday, August 05, 2007 6:07 pm Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Can you be more specific about those crashes you mention? Got bug reports? > > Rahul Sorry, that was over 2 years ago. I haven't had a problem with system fonts since I started using Fedora.

BTW, if Xorg doesn't need xfs, why is it that Xorg will crash if xfs isn't running?

Experimentation I performed at the time showed that the problem was the system didn't have any way of properly finding the fonts. When I started using xfs, the problem disappeared. That is why I'm worried about it.

I don't remember exactly which version I was running, because I don't shut down my system very often (it runs as both a server and a desktop). When I was configuring another Fedora system (with 7), I noted that Xorg wouldn't start without xfs.

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 04:35:42 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Kelly wrote: > > > Experimentation I performed at the time showed that the problem was the system > > didn't have any way of properly finding the fonts. When I started using xfs, > > the problem disappeared. That is why I'm worried about it. > > That should not happen in Fedora anymore. Depends on your configuration. Here with F7 and GNOME I could not stop xfs because fonts would be missing afterwards. E.g. Emacs fails fatally: $ emacs No fonts match `-*-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-100-iso8859-15' $ xterm Warning: Cannot convert string "nil2" to type FontStruct xterm: unable to open font "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso8859-15", trying "fixed".... And stopping a running xfs sort of "kills" X until the X server is restarted.

On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 12:54:31 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote: > On 8/7/07, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam(a)arcor.de&gt; wrote: > > On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 04:35:42 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > > > > > Kelly wrote: > > > > > > > Experimentation I performed at the time showed that the problem was the system > > > > didn't have any way of properly finding the fonts. When I started using xfs, > > > > the problem disappeared. That is why I'm worried about it. > > > > > > That should not happen in Fedora anymore. > > > > Depends on your configuration. Here with F7 and GNOME I could not stop > > xfs because fonts would be missing afterwards. E.g. Emacs fails fatally: > > > > $ emacs > > No fonts match `-*-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-100-iso8859-15' > > > > $ xterm > > Warning: Cannot convert string "nil2" to type FontStruct > > xterm: unable to open font "-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso8859-15", trying "fixed".... > > > > And stopping a running xfs sort of "kills" X until the X server is restarted. > > > Did you put the font paths into your xorg.conf Why me? Either Fedora 7 can run without xfs out of the box, or it can't, since the user would need to edit xorg.conf manually. Last time I ran system-config-display it didn't put any font paths into xorg.conf.

Arthur Pemberton wrote: > > According to the Google cache of the Xorg wiki (which was down at the > time), "The use of the font server xfs is deprecated due to several > bugs in it. It is recommended that the Xserver loads the fonts > directly." Right. Fedora is dropping XFS (X font server, not the filesystem) by default in the next version so this problem is going away. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureNoMoreXFS. Mostly done. Just a few fonts need to be fixed. Rahul

Somebody in the thread at some point said: > FontPath "/usr/local/share/fonts" I don't think Fedora packages have anything to do with /usr/local, it's (pretty conveniently) reserved for stuff you cook yourself. I noticed that a lot of source tarballs have a configure script that defaults to building down /usr/local, again that can be convenient. But I wonder if something you installed or built yesterday, probably not from a Fedora package, inserted that line. -Andy