[R-sig-Fedora] Problem with X11 fonts under Fedora 17.

[Marc Schwartz]

On Jan 12, 2013, at 6:08 PM, Rolf Turner <rolf.turner at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> On 01/13/2013 12:48 PM, peter dalgaard wrote:
>> Rolf,
>> 
>> Like Marc, I'm getting rusty on the Fedora details, but it's possible that the X server or the font server needs to be reset before changes take hold. Possible "xset fp rehash" in a terminal window? Or maybe "service xfs restart".
> 
> I tried
> 
>    xset fp rehash
> 
> and that produced no response --- no error message, but no "acknowledgement"
> either.  Then I tried
> 
>    sudo service xfs restart
> 
> and got
>> Redirecting to /bin/systemctl restart xfs.service
>> Failed to issue method call: Unit xfs.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status xfs.service' for details.
> 
> So I then tried
> 
>    systemctl status xfs.service
> 
> and got
>> xfs.service
>>      Loaded: error (Reason: No such file or directory)
>>      Active: inactive (dead)
> 
> Looks ominous, to say the least.  No idea what to do about it, but.
> 
> Doing
> 
>    yum search xfs.service
> 
> gives
>> Warning: No matches found for: xfs.service
>> No Matches found
> 
> I hope *somebody* out there can point me in the right direction.
> 
>    cheers,
> 
>        Rolf


Rolf,

Did some searching in the list archives and going back a number of years (early 2000's), there are some threads involving both Peter and I in replies to users with similar issues.

I don't know if Fedora still has this, but look for a file '/etc/X11/fs/config'.

If that is present, look at the contents and see if there are lines in it such as:

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled

Ideally, you should [also] have:

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi

which are the unscaled versions of the font configuration spec. If you don't have the latter incantation, you might try to add them or edit the former lines to remove the ':unscaled' part.

It is also possible that on more recent versions of Fedora, the paths have changed from the above.

You will likely need to restart the X11 server after any changes and this will all need to be done as root of course.

BTW, you might also check the config log that was generated when you first ran ./configure to see if there were any warnings about 'stuff' missing.

Regards,

Marc