X and fonts

[Ian Stephen]

Hi linux-users

Last night I ran up2date on my RH8 and updated glibc, glibc-common,
-devel and -utils, LPRng, arpwatch and libpcap.

Today I spent a very educational 7.5 hours getting X working again.

Perhaps someone could tell me if some of the resulting assumptions are
correct or not.

I learned that direct rendering doesn't work with xinerama, that config
files seem to be picky even about whitespace, /var/log is my friend,
/etc/X11/xkb/compiled is a symlink to /var/lib/xkb and that Lynx is a
wonderful thing when one wants to find and download old rpms with no X.

One of the errors was 'Cannot open "compiled/server-0.xkm" to write
keyboard' and /etc/X11/xkb/compiled was flashing an angry red and white
in ls output so I thought maybe xkbcomp compiles a keyboard map and puts
it in /var/lib/xkb during boot-up and maybe xkbcomp couldn't do that
with the new glibc versions (?).  Also found that /var/lib/xkb did not
exist.

With rpms in hand (which was a story in itself, having never seen Lynx
before!) I restored the glibc stuff to the previous versions with rpm -U
--oldpackage glibc*.80.i386.rpm.  Then rpm -i --force XFree86 put
/var/lib/xkb back again.

The last error to fix was "could not open default font 'fixed'", which I
finally solved by a forced install of XFree86-base-fonts

Questions I am left with now are whether the up2date I did last night
caused this or is that just a coincidence?  What would have made
/var/lib/xkb disappear?  What did reinstalling base-fonts do?  Looking
at /etc/X11/fs/config and the font paths contained in that file's
catalogue section provides no clues (at least not that I see).

I learned some time back not to play willy-nilly with things like
glibc.  Should I not even assume that up2date will update them safely? 
Is it better not to update those without a specific reason to do so?

Thanks for any guidance.

Ian Stephen
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