I just did the upgrade to 12.1 and I'm finding that a large number of my fonts are seriously screwed up, to the point of the system being unusable. Not everything is being affected, just some things. For example, in both Firefox and Thunderbird, most things are fine, but dialog boxes have square boxes instead of letters. Rox is similar as are a few other programs. What seems to be a common theme is that it is the small fonts (10 pts or less) that are goofed up (but not always, sometimes larger ones are as well).

The common theme seems to be Pango, and if I run one of the problem apps from the console, I get several entries like this:

It is repeated for every font that the program can't seem to deal with.

Things I've done so far:

Googling - This has been pretty uninformative and most of the threads I've seen are revolving around Firefox 3, which isn't the case here.

I've tried recompiling freetype (and enabled both subpixel rendering and bytecode rendering) and that didn't seem to make a difference.

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated as this may cause me to roll back to Slackware 12 in a hurry.

Sounds like an upgrade gone wrong. Did you follow CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT and UPGRADE.TXT in the root of the Slackware tree (DVD or CD#1)?

Eric

Yeah, I followed those to the letter. About the only serious deviation is that the upgrade media were mounted .iso files that reside on a separate server so I didn't do the switch to runlevel 1. Since it is a single user machine, I didn't think that would be an issue.

I don't have a clue if our problmes were related and if my solution would be correct in your case. But I had the problem that xorg wouldn't start because some «default fixed font» wasn't available. I did upgrade from Slackware 12.0 just like you.

Well here is what worked for me:
I logged in as root and launched pkgtool
From the menu I choosed "Setup" and then I marked both "04.mkfontdir" and "05.fontconfig" and choosed "ok".

I can try to explain what this actually does. The setup menu in pkgtool runs different installation scripts which you probably haven't run when you did your upgrade. The "04.mkfontdir" runs mkfontdir and mkfontscale in font directories, while "05.fontconfig" runs fc-cache to locate new fonts for Xft.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the thoughts. Unfortunately I ran out of time to fool around with this and ended up nuking from orbit and re-installing Slackware 12.1 from CD. Fonts are fine now, so I do suspect that Eric was right about an upgrade gone bad. For what it's worth, I did try running both mkfontdir and mkfontscale from console, but I never re-installed the way Mellar suggests.

Thanks again!