Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3555
Cannot install new X fonts
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
I copy the font sabvga.pcf (from http://etheme.tsx.org) to /usr/X11R6/include/X11/fonts/misc I run "mkfontdir". I run "xset fp rehash". I run "xterm -fn sabvga" it can't find the font. Whats the problem? the /usr/X11R6/include/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.dir has sabvga in it.
Did you try restarting xfs? Try /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs stop /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs start
Closing bug report on assumption that suggested fix worked. Reopen with more information if this is not the case.
I had the same problem and the suggested solution worked more or less but I think some improvement is possible. Originally, I had not noticed that running mkfontdir (as root) creates the fonts.dir file with permissions determined by the umask of root, perm=600 in my case. Restarting xfs seems to work initially , but xfs dies silently, crashing the X server. The X server will respawn and die about 10 times, then init gives up for 5 minutes. The upshot of this remark might be: 1) Shouldn't mkfontdir create the file font.dir to be readable by xfs? 2) xfs should write a useful mesage to the syslog if it can't read a file. 3) xfs should not die in this case, but simply discard the directory containig the offending file.