Linux has always ran on my laptop perfectly (except a few sound problems) untill yesturday. I was updating the kernel and was getting ready to edit lilo.conf. I shut the display to get something to drink (its set to do nothing but turn off the screen when the laptop is closed) and when I came back and opened up the display to find the screen was distorted and the computer was hanging. So I turned it off and and back on. As soon as it tried to load the graphical login the machine hung. After hitting xstart in a command line shell I found an error saying:

(II) NEOMAGIC(0): Not programming shadow registers
xIO: Fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server

A little farther up it also says:

Could not init font path element unix/:-1, removing from list!

Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'


Any ideas anyone?

Welcome to LQ, Jacob.

I'm glad to hear that, up until now, your Linux experience has been smooth. Doing a quick search on this site, I discovered that reconfiguring your X is probably the best idea. Since you're using Mandy, you could try running XFdrake as root.

Hope this helps.

I tried that and I always get errors saying: could not open default font 'fixed'

I just ran into this problem and have the following work around. Hope it helps:


Symptom:
Used RH update agent to update all packages. Upon restart the system would initialize fine up to the point where it started the Xserver and then the screen would go blank (black). I could get the text shell login prompt to appear briefly by either moving the mouse or hitting various cntrl-alt-fn combinations but the screen would return to blank within a few seconds.

Solution:
1. reboot and hit cntrl-x at the RH startup window.
2. type “linux –s” at the prompt to boot into the text shell.

After reading through /var/log/Xfree86.log it appeared that the system wasn’t able to find the correct fonts in order to boot. The last line read “could not init font path…”

3. The solution was to comment out the line ‘FontPath “unix/:7100”’ in the files
/etc/X11/Xfree86 and /etc/X11/Xfree86-4 and then reboot.

Of course this took a day and half to figure out.

The following link was helpful: http://www.linuxcare.com/viewpoints/tales/12-15-99.epl

This doesn’t really fix the problem of making the true type fonts available but I didn’t notice any difference in the fonts upon reboot so I didn’t have them before anyway. Perhaps RH 8.0 will fix that or the latest update from www.Xfree86.org.

Paul