In a message of Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:07:53 EDT, Josh Metzler writes: >On Thursday 20 October 2005 08:11 am, Laura Creighton wrote: >> I'm having a problem with fontconfig and kde. >> >> Every so often, all my fonts go away. Nothing but little boxes. >> xterm works fine, only kde apps are affected. >> >> dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig does not fix the problem. What does fix >> the problem is to go to /usr/lib and then remove (or rename) fontconfig >.a >> >> Kde running without libfontconfig then initialises itself properly, and >> all is well again. You can move libfontconfig.a back, too. Do you kno >w >> what happens when kde tries to run without libfontconfig? I would like >> to know what it is that needs resetting, so I can better find out how i >t >> is getting mangled in the first place. > >This seems fairly strange to me. libfontconfig.a is part of the >libfontconfig1-dev and is a static library. Its only use is to statically >link it into other applications or libraries. It should not affect kde at >all, as kde is dynamically linked to fontconfig and so >uses /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so. > >So, are you sure that removing/renaming that file is what fixes your >problem? Could it just be restarting kde that is doing it?
Definitely restarting kde has absolutely no effect whatsoever. However, I also moved /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so so it could be that this was the moving that fixed things. What happened was strange -- my intention was to recompile the libfontconfig library by hand. So I moved /usr/lib/fontconfig* to /usr/lib/oldfontconfigs, on the theory that it is always possible to make things even worse than they are now, and if I did so, it would be nice to revert back. Then, before I could get around to recompiling it, I needed to immediately reboot the machine to fix a completely unrelated problem with an experimental hardware I am writing. To my astonishment, things came up ok. Since that time I have had the 'fonts go away' problem twice, and both times moving /usr/lib/fontconfig* to a different directory, then rebooting the machine, and moving it back has fixed things quite nicely. But I do not understand why. >If it is that file that is causing you problems, uninstalling >libfontconfig1-dev should remove it from your system. Unfortunately, I have some packages that depend on it. Indeed this may be related to the problem. I typically leave this machine running all the time. So when I reboot, and lose all my fonts, I have no way of knowing what package update provoked the problem. Laura > >Josh > > >-- >To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] >with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] >.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
