X and fonts

[Net Llama!]

My experience with dual heads (AKA Xinerama) is limited, so take my 
comments with a grain or two of sale.

On 04/26/03 16:47, Ian Stephen wrote:
> 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,

Which config files?  /etc/X11/XF86Config is not picky about white space 
at all.

> /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.

That much is true.

> 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

I've got a README in /var/lib/xkb which states:
##########################
The X server uses this directory to store the compiled version of the
current keymap and/or any scratch keymaps used by clients.  The X server
or some other tool might destroy or replace the files in this directory,
so it is not a safe place to store compiled keymaps for long periods of
time.  The default keymap for any server is usually stored in:
      X<num>-default.xkm
where <num> is the display number of the server in question, which makes
it possible for several servers *on the same host* to share the same
directory.

Unless the X server is modified, sharing this directory between servers on
different hosts could cause problems
##########################

> 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.

So you're saying that you didn't have a /var/lib/xkb after the glibc 
upgrade?

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

I don't see how this could be directly related to the upgrades.

> 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

Provided the default fixed font that you were missing.  How long had it 
been since you rebooted and/or restarted X before last night's occurances?

> 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?

up2date is usually quite safe, in my experience.  Then again, i build my 
own version of XFree86, so i've never really needed to use Redhat's 
version of it, with or without the updates.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

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