linux question - How to correct font problem

Submitted by Phill on Sat, 10/28/2006 - 2:48pm. Ragchew

Hello folks. I really appreciated the expert assistance from Peter (and others) on configuring my Dell 2450 to run Debian 'testing' version. From time to time I use 'aptitude update and upgrade' to get the latest package changes. About two Saturdays ago after doing 'aptitude upgrade' all text on every dialog menu, title bar, static text box, or browse box is just a bunch of squares for each character. The text on a web page or in a text editor is readable, but the text at the top of the brwoser related to menus or any error message is a series of squares. I am able to get onto the PC by guessing when to enter my login credentials and guessing what the options on error dialogs mean.

Does anyone know what I should do to try to resolve this issue. I have tired a lot of things, and totally broke X so it would not start, and then fixed that problem. But I still have this font problem. It looks to me like X is configured to use 100dpi fonts, and that they and all of the other font folders are missing. So I used apt-get to install xfonts-base xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-scalable etc. I even used aptitude to install as many of the true type fonts I could find (which is when the broken X server started working again). When I install the xfonts-xxx package it reports that the related folder is missing (I think it is /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi, etc. for each package) There is currently a .../fonts/misc and a ...../fonts/util folder but nothing for 100dpi or 75dpi.

Also another issue that started happening about the same time is that I noticed that after I turn the PC off, some time the next day it will turn itself on. I did not find anything in the bios related to this nor did I find anything on the internet. So if anyone has advice on tracking this issue down I would like to disable the automatic turn on 'feature'.

Any advice would be apreciated. Thanks for the bandwidth.
Phill, n0oe

» login or register to post comments | previous forum topic | 363 reads
kc0qwl's picture

linux question - How to

Submitted by kc0qwl on Fri, 11/10/2006 - 3:20pm.

I see this post is a bit old, but if you haven't found a solution for the mysterious powering on, I would double check the bios, and look for "wake on lan" or "wake on modem" settings, and turn them off.

» login or register to post comments
W1SDM's picture

How to correct font problem

Submitted by W1SDM on Sun, 10/29/2006 - 8:59pm.

Phil,

I am no expert on Linux (a little better with FreeBSD, but have never run Linux), but I did find this information:

Check this issue of DWN:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2001/23/

It includes this tidbit:
Fonts missing after upgrade.
Several people have reported problems with fonts after X was
upgraded. Characters appeared as boxes within Gnumeric, GIMP, XMMS
or other programs. This is caused by the presence of ISO10646-1
("Unicode") encoded fonts in the new 4.1.0 X font packages. Many
applications and toolkits don't specify what character encoding
they want when requesting a font, and aren't equipped to handle
the return of a 16-bit font. Using the X Font Server (xfs) from
XFree86 4.x will fix the problem. People have reported that
changing the font ordering in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 will also
work, though it may only be a fortunate coincidence.

Take a look at that and see if it doesn't lead you to a solution.

Good luck!

--
Tom Green - W1SDM
http://www.mindformation.com/

» login or register to post comments

Thanks for debian news, still looking for a solution

Submitted by Phill on Sat, 11/11/2006 - 10:10pm.

Thanks for the information, and sorry for the delay in getting back to check this blog.

This 'testing' build of debian uses xorg rather than X86Free but I followed the advice in the post and reordered the font paths in the xorg.conf file. But that did not solve the problem.

Unlike the sample at of the conf file at the link in your post, my xorg.conf has a "FontPath unix/:7100" as the first entry. This causes fonts to be loaded from a font server and the paths that were reordered are only used if the font server is not located. So I commented out the font server line and rebooted. Then Xserver failes to start and I get a series of log files to review. The log files have an entry for each FontPath that is in the conf file that indicates the coresponding directeries do not exist. Some of the paths do exist but they only have one file in them. The 100dpi folder has xfonts-100dpi.alias in it.

So I am still looking for a solution to this issue. Thanks for the information because it has given me a few more ideas to investigate. If anyone has any other ideas I would appreciate the assistance, since all dialogs except this text box only have squares displayed it is a bit like driving a car with no visibility through the windows.
Phill, n0oe

» login or register to post comments