Description of Problem: I have seen manifestations of this problem not only on alpha and with other releases 4.1.0-14 but this has to be filed somewhere. :-) After an update X server does not want to start because "fixed" font cannot be found. A closer investigation reveals that in various subdirectories of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/ files like 'fonts.dir' and/or 'encodings.dir' are missing apparently at random. Various font packages execute the same postinstallation script which looks like this: for fontdir in 100dpi 75dpi CID Speedo Type1 misc \ latin2/{Type1} ;do umask 133;/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir -e \ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings -e \ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings/large \ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/$fontdir || : /usr/sbin/chkfontpath -q -a /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/$fontdir || : done Executing "manually" just mkfontdir-part of the loop above restores sanity immediately. Is this 'chkfontpath' responsible for the resulting mess? On this particular test installation the following packages were really used in an update: XFree86-100dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-75dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-ISO8859-15-100dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-ISO8859-15-75dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts-4.1.0-14.alpha.rpm
Once X is updated, both xfs and XFree86 need to be restarted and everything should work fine. I can't reproduce the problem you're describing.
Well, sure, but restarting X and xfs does not help with recreating various missing 'fonts.dir' and encoding files. It was actually hard to notice that something is funny without restarting xfs. I have suspicions, but not a "smoking gun", that the problem is some mixup during updates when fonts with various encodings are installed. When you tried to reproduce did you have only iso8859-1 fonts on a machine or some other ones as well?
Problem is not reproduceable in rawhide currently. Closing as fixed in rawhide.