Hello. I'm pretty new to Linux (last time I tried it I used an old redhat 6.1 cd - i think), but a few days ago I got myself Slackware 9. Since, I have installed the NVIDIA display drivers for my GF3, downloaded the kernel source for 2.4.21, patched it to 2.4.22, added the ntfs patch, recompiled and upgraded my kernel.

Then I decided I wanted some decent fonts in X. So, following some instructions somewhere, I downloaded myself the freetype 2.1.5rc1 sources, and enabled the bytecode interpreter. Then I compiled and installed it to both /usr and /usr/X11R6 . I then used the KDE font installer to add truetype fonts from my winxp partition. Having rebooted a bit, and set the screensize parameter, they seemed to work nicely. However, I then tried them from another user I created (all that above stuff was with root), and found that all the new TTFs just showed up as the 'no character' blocks.

I have tried uninstalling freetype, reinstalling it, reinstalling the fonts and a bunch of other crap, but nothing has worked. Oh, and the nightly build of firebird I put in /usr/share only seems to work from admin too. And there are some "drawing errors" present in X's output after I quit it when I am not root. I didn't see any graphical problems (apart from the missing fonts)..

Any ideas?

could be a permissions problem. Did you try see if your /usr/share/fonts directory (or whereever the fonts are installed) has read permissions set for non-root users all the way down the tree? If not you can do this by chmod -R a+r /usr/share/fonts

From what you say, it sounds like you were running KDE as root when you were installing the fonts and freetype. That might be part of the problem - you should never run kde as root anyway; run it as a normal user and just type in the root password when it asks for it.

What exactly is the problem with firebird?

Thankyou for your reply. Using font installer while not in root helped - I reinstalled the fonts this way, and after a bit of fiddling they work fine. As for firebird, I think the it wanted the fonts - it works now too.