Hello,

I ran XFS, then turned it off, tried fonts in XF86Config one at a time, same problem: when X starts fonts are DISTORTED. You can almost read the characters but beginning of words would be missing, half of characters missing form end of words e.t.c.

What can it be, resolution? Mine is 640x480 with 8 bit colors. This doesn't happen at color depth 4. Maybe I should change the /fs/config resolution line? But I'm not sure what each argument stands for.

it's rather the driver of your vga card.
see the man page about it. example: "man tseng"
then try to set the options in your XF86Config file.
fonts are also set there. it should look something like this:

Section "Files"
FontPath "tcp/192.168.1.30:7100" < this is a external fontserver you may use "unix/:7100"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/CID"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
EndSection

order matters, and your path may be different. depends on the distribution.

anyway, since fonts work with lower colors i'd think of a prob with the driver to your card.

sl mritch.

I have all those fonts commented out. I'm using xfs and specified only 'misc' font in the /fs/config for testing purposes.

'man tseng' doesn't give no info on the driver whatsoever.

Also, what are locales for (UTF-8) ?? I remember when installing X86 it was asking locales and I chose UTF-8 and one other with a long number because they had us-en in front of them. But I have no idea what they are for.

keep those fonts. they are not your problem.
your locale settings don't mess it up too.
be sure to have fonts for your language installed. they are iso8859-1 or -2 or -15 or utf-8 google for more info.
if you use en_xx or nothing fancy don't worry too much, it shoulöd be all right on your sys.

the prob lcould be:
-something is smoothing your fonts to unreadability
-your vga driver can't handle (display) your fonts right

ok.
what window manager are you using?
what version of Xfree/x.org are you running?
what vga driver (+ card) to you use?

to get info 'bout your version see /var/log/XFree86.0.log. to see the vga-driver see the /etc/X11/XF86Config file section "device"

sl mritch.

Right now I'm using AfterStep wm. But the same problem persists with other wm's.

Xfree86 v4

driver: tseng with 1024kb mem, it's integrated.

yeah. that's one of those *very* usable manpages (i get the same usful for my cirrus;-).

there has been a significant change from xfree v3 to v4 (new drivers written). the tseng card are well supported in v3 and i think you'll have not problems setting it up in the v3 series (used a few of them myself). but it may be lot of work for you to switch back.

aren't you able to use 16bit colors in 640x480? what's your hardware, this seems like an quite old machine to me?

here is another: (follow the steps, as root)
find the script that starts the xserver and set dpi:
cd /etc; grep -ir "\-dpi" *
you'll get a list of files containing the "-dpi" string. on my sys it's in /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc, but your may vary).
now edit this file (should also contain "-nolisten-tcp") and lower/raise the dpi setting to 72 (other:75..81..100) and restart the server.


sl mritch.

That's a good idea to try v3. I've no problem reinstalling the system because I've done it a dozen times this week already. The dpi changes had no effect. Depth 16 gives the following error:

(EE) TSENG(0): Given depth (16) is not supported by this chipset/RAMDAC

This is an old Compaq 486 machine. Ok, I'll let you know how v3 fares.

[runs to reinstall]

I SOLVED IT! But in a different way. After reading up on X86 v3 I found out about xserver-w32! Before that I was using vga. So I reinstalled Xfree86 v4 but with the w32 server. Everything is working great now. Thanks for the help