I had to shut down my laptop running Fedora Core 1 with Gnome in a hurry today, so I didn't bother to close any of the windows that were open (two terminals, and a text editor) before I logged out of the machine using the standard procedure.

I returned to the machine later in the day to find that when I run 'startx' from the console (my system boots into text mode by default) I get the error:

Could not init font path element unix/:7100
Fatal server error: could not open default font 'fixed'

I have searched through the forums here and found a lot about restarting the X Font Server (xfs) and restarted it numerous times, to no avail.

Finally I found a post recommending commenting out the line --

FontPath "unix/:7100"

-- from the XF86Config file.

I did this, and now I'm back up and running in X where everything appears normal, but my question is: why did this break in the first place, and is an X Font Server a necessary service to run? Is commenting this line out of the XF86Config a standard procedure? What is going on here?

Sincerely,

Erik