I wanted to use Debian on an old laptop P1 75MHz 800MBHD 40MBRAM, no CDROM. As you can see the space is limited. I installed Debian Woody from floppies and the net, and liked it and used it happily for a while (with IceWM), but I was upset that I couldn't get the current versions of software. (Gaim would only connect to AIM not MSN or anything else, etc...)

So I installed Sarge from the sarge floppies and the net, but it took up nearly 400MB, and was much slower, so it wasn't an option on a laptop so old, so I figured I'll go with the mixed Woody/Sarge option.

I re-installed Woody, added X, and then edited my /etc/apt/sources.list to the testing or unstable tree, forgot which, and did apt-get update to refresh my package list, but from then on whenever I'd do apt-get install anything, it would want to install a sizeable amount of other packages, including X and font libraries, graphics libraries, and even "libc6!"

Once, I told it okay, it could update all that. It did so, and then when I went into IceWM, all the graphics were fine, but the text was really messed up. You could in some cases tell basically what it said, but it looked like someone blew hard on the screen and the pixels flew around. I don't think it's an X server problem as the graphics worked fine, maybe it's an xfs problem? Or something totally different.

Now I reinstalled Woody, and am sitting with only Woody Stable [old!] packages installed, and would like to install new versions of software.

So please either help me get rid of the font problem and I'll do all these upgrades, or advise on how to keep current base and X, and install new software.

Thanks in advance, hope I have made everything clear (it's just the standard Woody things at this point.)

Coming back and seeing no replies in quite a while, I went ahead and did the upgrade. This time though, while apt was pre-configuring fontconfig, I chose to use the regular Autohinter font rendering method instead of the sub-pixel rendering method that is preferred for LCD screens. And guess what? All was well.

Has anyone else experienced this or similar problems when using the sub-pixel rendering method?

More about the sub-pixel rendering method available at http://grc.com/ctwhat.htm

I don't know if it's the same problem, but it definitely sounds similar. On Debian unstable, my fonts in Gnome or KDE look like crap. But only when I login as user. When I login as root they are fine.

I have a laptop with LCD and changing font rendering method with the font configuration thing in Gnome doesn't noticably improve the fonts. Maybe I'd need to restart X for that first?

I'll try to reconfigure fontconfig as you suggested and see if that helps.

Cheers, Leon.

Thanks so much! I'm not familiar with the Gnome font rendering method, but most probably it just writes the new setting to your X server configuration file, and so yes, you'd probably need to restart the X server and the X font server, but probably you should just reboot.

The thing is I don't know why it would make any difference whether it's on root or a normal user. Unless you have them configured to use different X servers, which is unlikely especially on a normal desktop computer.

Well anyways, thanks for testing!