[Wylug-help] X fonts

[John Hodrien]

Dave Fisher wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> My Xorg.log (below) reports a "Fatal server error:
>   could not open default font 'fixed';".
> 
> I've seen the symptoms before, but they've often been manifestations
> of different underlying problems ... in some cases, just bad
> packaging, in others oversights on my part (e.g. inadvertently
> disabling a font server).
> 
> I'm afraid that the xfont system and its debian/ubuntu implementation
> are two of those things I've always planned to learn properly, but
> never quite got round to ... not least, because of their apparent
> complexity and my inability to find one good high level overview to start
> from.
> 
> It may be unrealistic of me to hope for pointers to such a document, but
> if anyone recognises the symptoms, or can just describe the standard
> debian setup for the key components (font servers, defoma, fontconfig,
> xfonts-base, etc), I'd appreciate it. For example, which of the many
> packaged font servers should I actually be using these days?

What have you done to your machine to break it?  Or is this a new install and so 
has never been working?

Is the font server running?  Traditionally this would be a process called xfs. 
If it's not, does it run if you kick it into life (/etc/init.d/xfs start, perhaps)?

If it doesn't start up:

Have you changed permissions on /tmp to be incorrect?
Has /tmp run out of disk space/inodes?

jh