From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90) Description of problem: (Component is actually XFree86-xfs, not available in list to select.) The /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs initscript tests for the presence of the symbolic link /usr/X11R6/bin/X and if it is not present, does not start the X11 font server xfs. Since there are many reasons why one might want to run the X11 font server without the X executable loaded I should think a more finely grained method of enabling/disabling the X11 font server ought to be chosen. This would enable, for example, third-part apps that need the X11 font server, to edit a config file to enable xfs rather than having to go through the hack of creating a fake /usr/X11R6/bin/X symbolic link to fool the initscript. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install the X11 font server without /usr/X11R6/bin/X 2. Run /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs start 3. Run /etc/rc.d/init./xfs status Actual Results: xfs status reports "xfs is stopped" Expected Results: xfs ought to be running Additional info:
I believe the reason that check is in there is because someone reported a bug where xfs gets started on a machine if installed, even if no X server is present or used. The default behaviour should be for the common case, which is where an X server is used, however there are problems with both situations. I will have to think about this a bit to figure out a new way of solving the other problem without causing this one.
I appreciate the problem. How about modifying the /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs script so that xfs is started if EITHER (a) the /usr/X11R6/bin/X link is present OR (b) the file /etc/sysconfig/xfs contains a certain parameter (RUN_ALWAYS = yes). This would preserve your existing behaviour and enable third-party packages that need the font server to force xfs to be started without caring whether or not X11 is installed/running.
Yes, something like that might work ok, but we'd need a simple way of configuring it that is end user visible. I have plans of extending the functionality of xfs, and supporting much more rare and corner case configurations in the future, and of adding config tool support for them too, including running xfs standalone serving fonts to other machines. I just need to find the time to do it sometime without higher priority task pileup. ;o) I'm going to defer this for now, and return to it in a future release, when I tackle these issues.
After rethinking this, I've decided to remove the check afterall. If there are complaints about xfs starting on systems without an X server, I'll handle it another way. 4.3.0-13.1 in rawhide will have this change.
*** Bug 92073 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***