The X Font Server fails to start up when /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs calls mkfontdir due to mkfontdir making non-world-readable fonts.dir files. This also causes the X server to fail starting up. To fix this, insert a umask command before mkfontdir is called in the init script: ... buildfontlist() { umask 022 for d in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/* /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/*/* /usr/share/fonts/* /usr/share/fonts/*/*; do ...
Is your system setup different than default, because I haven't experienced this problem and I have setup two separate systems with 6.2 and the permissions have been correct on both and xfs has been starting up normal. Did you upgrade or something? -Stan Bubrouski
Not that I know of. Perhaps my default umask for root is different, but I just now experienced the same problem on a brand new install on an alpha. It only seems to show up after the next reboot after running X. (i.e., it did not happen the first time I started up X.) After rebooting, xfs reports "[ OK ]" on startup, but "ps auxw|grep xfs" shows that xfs is not actually running.
have you changed your default root umask?
you have changed your default root umask, but I have adjusted the xfs init script to check for this for our next release.