Somehow, my wife uninstalled the "fixed" font from her Mandriva 2006 system, and now it will not start X (KDE). I believe she did this through the Mandriva Control Center font manager, but she's not sure what she did.

Does anyone know how I can get the core fonts reinstalled or reconfigured so that her machine will come back up?

So far, we've tried uninstalling xorg-x11-100dpi-fonts and xorg-x11-75dpi-fonts then reinstalling them, through urpme and urpmi respectively. However, this didn't seem to change anything.

Thanks for any help that can be provided!

i'd think that this is more likely to be down to the X font server not running for some reason, is the xfs service running when you try to start X?

Yes, xfs is running.

After chatting a bit more with her, she said that when she was choosing to uninstall some fonts, a message came up warning her that the operation may crash X. It did.

The error message reported after trying "startx" is:

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

I just wanted to thank you for your post. I was having a problem with an install and had to do a minimal install because every time that I would install what I wanted, the computer would lock up. Anyway, after installing X by hand and having the error about the fonts, I was finally able to get into X on the machine thanks to your post and wanted to let you know that it is much appreciated.

i'd wonder if you've upgrade too far and the font locations have changed? many distros have recently moved fonts from places /usr/X11R6/fonts to /usr/share/fonts and such.

Dear sirs:

Is there any way you could be more specific as to the steps to take to resolve this issue? I have the same problem with "Default font fixed" and have looked all over the place to find someone who can give a simple, step by step proceedure to remedy this problem? Anybody up to it?

Have a great morning!

sirs?? i'm sure none of us are knights of the realm...

this error message is very generic, and can be caused by a myriad of different things, there are no specific "steps" to fis this until we know what's actually caused it.

What other info do you require? Am running Mandriva 2006 free on a PIII 500Mhz.

well i've already made two suggestions about what could be causing it, and remember, this is not your thread, it's purpleguitars. this thread is to help him, not you, meaning i'd not be suprised if your two root causes had nothign to do with each other at all. you'd do better to post your won thread after exhausting all existing aveneues, e.g. searching lq and google etc...

Looks like Google is the right answer. I tried

exactly like that, including the double quotes.

Found pages and pages of people who've had that message, mostly with stories about how they fixed it. (Different stories...lol)