I typically update my Cygwin installations about once a month, and rarely run into any difficulties. However, this morning after updating I could no longer start any X applications due to some apparent font problems. Please note that I successfully installed the *new* Cygwin/X a couple of months ago, and previously resolved some of the seemingly more common font problems (like "boxes" showing up in emacs).
This time, I was getting "Unable to load any usable iso8859 font" errors anytime I'd try to start xterm. I searched the FAQs and the web, but was unable to find any suggestions that led to a solution. At one point, while trying to fix the problem, I also got the "could not open default font 'fixed'" error, but none of the solutions listed in the FAQ were applicable (either the problem described was obviously not a match, or the solution, like re-installing all fonts, had already been tried). As a last resort, I used the Cygwin setup log to figure out which packages had been updated, and rolled them all back to the versions I was previously using. Now my X applications are working fine again, so something in one of the updated packages definitely triggered this problem. Incidentally, the only unusual messages in XWin.0.log were the typical "Could not init font path element" warnings that I always get (for /usr/share/fonts//TTF, /usr/share/fonts/OTF, and /usr/share/fonts/Type1). Sorry, I failed to save a copy of the XWin.0.log when I was having these problems. Although, I don't know if it would have been any help, because the X server itself seemed to be starting fine. Here is the list of packages that I updated to this morning (taken from the Cygwin setup log): compface/compface-1.5.2-1.tar.bz2 libapr1/libapr1-1.3.3-3.tar.bz2 nas/libaudio2/libaudio2-1.9.1-2.tar.bz2 X11/freetype2/libfreetype-devel/libfreetype-devel-2.3.8-1.tar.bz2 X11/freetype2/libfreetype2-devel/libfreetype2-devel-2.3.8-1.tar.bz2 X11/freetype2/libfreetype26/libfreetype26-2.3.8-1.tar.bz2 X11/freetype2/libfreetype6/libfreetype6-2.3.8-1.tar.bz2 gmp/libgmp3/libgmp3-4.2.4-1.tar.bz2 X.Org/libX11/libX11-devel/libX11-devel-1.1.5-2.tar.bz2 X.Org/libX11/libX11_6/libX11_6-1.1.5-2.tar.bz2 util-linux/util-linux-2.14.1-1.tar.bz2 xemacs/xemacs-21.4.22-1.tar.bz2 xemacs/xemacs-emacs-common/xemacs-emacs-common-21.4.22-1.tar.bz2 X.Org/xinit/xinit-1.1.1-1.tar.bz2 X.Org/xorg-server/xorg-server-1.5.3-5.tar.bz2 X11/xterm/xterm-238-1.tar.bz2 _update-info-dir/_update-info-dir-00796-1.tar.bz2 -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/