Howdy All..

As the subject line suggests, I am having problems with fontconfig. After searching the net into the wee hours of the morning, I am a bit frustrated. I understand the importance of reading and doing one's own research, and that is partly the reason for my frustration here. Can anyone recommend some documentation on fontconfig and it's purpose? (besides the man page and doc on site)

Anyways, I installed slack 9 via cd (iso), and downloaded the fluxbox binary. I installed it, and all seems to be well. However, when I try to run apps such as xchat or gaim, I get the dreaded "No Fonts Found" error. There is also a Xrender error before that, but I have discovered that it is not a "critical" error (causing the app. to crash). I have done some reading on the newsgroups, followed some steps, even went as far to download fontconfig src, and compile it. But to no avail. Can anyone recommend any howto's or helpsites?

csnow

What exactly are you trying to do?
Install new fonts?

These programs really should work to begin with unless you didn't install the True Type fonts that come with Slackware 9.0 or didn't install fontconfig. The True Type fonts that come with Slack 9 are not very good fonts, but they should at least allow these programs (the ones that rely on fontconfig) to work. (Slackware Current includes the Bitstream Vera True Type fonts, which are very good, so this problem will be taken care of in the next release) There should be True Type fonts, as well as a fonts.cache-1 file, in the directory /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/TTF. What do you find in this directory? If there are no font files (.ttf) then you need to install some True Type fonts. If there are font files, then fontconfig is probably not installed (or not installed correctly).

Well, just to post an update,



Mistakenly I was installing an old version of fontconfig. (v2.0 I believe -- the one with all the seperate binaries in the tree - Xrender, Xft etc) After downloading and installing v2.2?, The fontconfig problem was no more. Xrender still isn't clicking, but I chalk that up to being a problem with the ATi driver or X server for the mach64 chipset, as I saw that somewere in a newsgroup while searching for the above problem.

Thanks for the help...

csnow

Ok, hi there. I know, this problem is a bit older, but I've been sitting here for 3 weeks now, figuring what the problem could be...

Well, I think I've got it:
I just wanted to install fontconfig... (I downloaded 2.2)
but it didn't work because ./configure told me all the files would be in the future...
so I did a reboot and actualized the time (which actually was set so 14th of october 2000 !) and when I started linux it had to reboot again during booting, because of changes including re-reading of fontfiles and searching them, too.
now, i can start gnome without getting the fontconfig problem...

cu,
Nadim (aka Nachtengel)