total font loss mayhem in kde3.4.2

27B-6 · 09-14-2005, 09:01 AM

I'm running Slack 10.1 on a p4.

So I just installed an Nvidia GeForce4 mx 4000. The installer didn't like my 2.4.22 kernel with rivafb support, so I decided to (gulp) go for the gold and compile 2.6.13. Amazingly, after several tries, i managed to get it going fine.

Well, the fonts in kde in 1280x1024 on a 17" lcd suddenly didn't look nearly as nice as before, with an old radeon 7000. In fact, they looked like junk. Turning antialiasing off/on didn't seem to affect anything.

So I blundered stupidly forward. I reinstalled the freetype and qt packages, no change. Then, I tried to reinstall the fontconfig package. I removed it, then tried to slapt-get it. Holy crap, there is no fontconfig slackware package! (I have no idea what I was thinking. Why would reinstalling that stuff make any change?)

I dropped out of X and restarted. X wouldn't start. Googled my butt off. I reinstalled x11-devel. Apparently that package has fontconfig stuff in it. X/KDE started up, but alas, not a font anywhere, just boxes.

Googled my butt off some more. For the longest time fc-cache and fc-list would only spit out "error: could not load default config file." I somehow rectified that. (what did I do? maybe made an empty "local.conf" file in etc/fonts? can't remember). I ran fc-cache -fv as root in /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts, and it said it cached them all. However, fc-list shows nothing whatsoever. KDE still shows nothing but boxes. xlsfonts lists a ton of them.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Or maybe give me some other ideas? I am completely bamboozled.

Thanks much.
ryan

kodon · 09-15-2005, 06:30 PM

hmm.

try the default /etc/fonts/local.conf:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
	<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>

and updating fontconfig.

27B-6 · 09-15-2005, 07:50 PM

FIXED.

I upgraded my x11 base package to xorg 6.8.2 or whatever the most recent one is. Still nothing from fc-list, after fc-cache -fv'ing all over the place. Stumbled across some obscure forum post somewhere, somebody suggested copying the config files in /etc/fonts to /usr/local/etc/fonts. I did that. Suddenly, fonts restored.

Thanks, Kodon, for your reply.

Love slackware, even though i botch things bad sometimes. Thanks all for an awesome forum.

ryan