X and fonts

[Andrew Mathews]

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.

None of these should have had any effect on your X configuration.

> 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.

No valuable knowledge here, so no valuable advice.

> 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.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but these are the type of experiences you 
can't get from a book, and while painful, it does have benefits.

> 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?  

I seriously doubt it. More likely a change made since the last restart 
of your X server, but before you ran up2date.

> 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?

The up2date of glibc used to break several xfs tools such as xfsdump 
back around xfs v.1.0.2, however it doesn't break anything since 1.1.  I 
feel safe using up2date for everything but the kernel, which is excluded 
by default. (especially since the errata kernels are for ext3, not xfs)

> Thanks for any guidance.
> 
> Ian Stephen

Check out fam to keep track of your file alterations. Tripwire will work 
too if configured properly.

-- 
Andrew Mathews
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