Yes, I am back. I am back because I have information to share again.
First, thanks to Brian Schellenberger for this one. I was able to reproduce
the mysterious font server crashes that have been plaguing more than a few
running Mandrake 7.0.
Look in /tmp There are two directories in the hidden files
.X11-unix whose contents may vary but always seem to include a file called X0
which has a socket icon
.font-unix whose contents may vary but always seem to include the (socket) fs-1.
Of course hardly anyone but Brian and I seem to make separate /tmp partitions
(probably Axalon does, just to dodge the /tmp overflow hack), so few would have
thought to report any changes made to /tmp as significant to the mysterious
font crashes.
DON'T try this on anything but a test system loaded on its own partition, but
if you delete the hidden directories on /tmp. your font server will NOT start
on next reboot.
I think either a) We are missing the regeneration at boot time of these
directories, which seem to hold only sockets, or b) These
directories should be in another directory, definitely not /tmp. I haven't
begun to examine the initscripts for the code relevant to these, but I can
disable the xfs by removing them. Later I will try the effects of each one
individually and look a little more thoroughly. I wasn't able to restore the
services by recreating the directories, only by reinstalling X. More
experimentation will be done, but perhaps some others will want to try some
things.
Civileme
