[ILUG] KDE & fonts

[Declan Moriarty]

Was it Stephane Dudzinski who wrote on Monday 18 February 2002 08:51:
> Next step is then to check your XF86Config file, here's mine, it might
> help you.

> On Mon, 2002-02-18 at 09:02, Declan Moriarty wrote:
> > Was it Stephane Dudzinski who wrote on Monday 18 February 2002 08:27:
> > > A simple (and dirty) one is to keep only the X11 fonts in your
> > > XF86Config and comment out all the other lines, works for me.

> > > On Sun, 2002-02-17 at 19:09, Declan Moriarty wrote:
> > > > I have the old /usr/X11R6 tree in /usr/oldX11, and a correct enough
> > > > system on another partition. What do I fiddle to fix it?

> > Thanks Steph - it's not the problem. There IS only X11 fonts in
> > XF86Config, and most things run fine - Gnome, Icewm. But KDE is screwed.
> > It has some tiny font that appears as a singlle line ('--' except
> > thinner), and all the window sizes are too small. I'm missing something
> > vital methinks.


I went and checked this out to the limit of my severely challenged 
administrative competence, and thanks very much Steph. I have tried the 
following at this stage.

1. The M$ solution - reinstall kdebase. This trick  *never* works in linux

2. Comparing your XF86Config with my own. My own had enough FontPath entries, 
and similar modules loaded. 

3. In a departure from the norm, Mandrake used their own font server; you put 
the line  FontPath  "unix:/-1" in /etc/XF86Config, and then configure your 
fonts in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config . They then have this script which 
(typically) which calls a symlink to a symlink to a symlink to a script which 
calls three scripts which reads five config files, exports  contents and runs 
every script in some weird directory. I digress. X-4.2.0 did not like that 
FontPath, so it had to go. Personally, I don't blame it.

4. Back with the longest FontPath I could muster, I tried looking at a sound 
version of kcontrol. When you start kcontrol, the 3rd menu down is 
Look'n'Feel, and the 4th choice down that is fonts. Not on my new X-4.2.0, 
where the whole of kcontrol's choices area is blank, and you can't get past 
the startup screen  

5. After peering into the manpage of cp, I tried
cp -ruv <old X11 tree> /usr/X11R6 which might just have landed missing files 
into the X11 tree. Drakfont now has fonts which I can see, but a mighty 
percentage of them are dodgy, i.e they come up as squares, and I did get 
another core dump out of drakfont. Everything else in kde is as before. I 
don't ever want to run kde - it's bloatware; I do want to use a few programs 
from it - like kmail and kedit.


-- 
	Regards,


	Declan Moriarty




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