Re: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts
On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 09:24:26PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: m...@pc-networking-services.com wrote: Hello, When we install xorg following the BLFS_7.5 stable book, when you first start x using the startx command, it will complain bitterly about the ISO fonts are lacking and it will NOT correctly bring up twm with the three windows and clock. (If you installed the clock.) To solve this issue you need to actually install the international fonts: ftp://ftp.openbsd.com/ports/distfiles/intlfonts-1.2.tar.gz After I installed these fonts I actually rebooted my computer and when I issued the startx command, after a couple minutes twm started correctly and the clock also came up correctly. Maybe it would be a good idea to add this to the user notes or to the xorg instructions page. This is easily verified by doing a completely fresh install and testing. Do you have the LANG or LC_* environment variables set? I've never loaded intlfonts and have never had a problem. Also, you must have a really slow system. For me, twm comes up in about 2 seconds. -- Bruce I agree that the intlfonts are not normally needed - I don't usually build twm, but I used it when testing BLFS-7.4 in en_GB.UTF-8. What particularly puzzles me about the suggestion that it is needed, is that BLFS has _all_ the legacy core fonts, i.e. the current versions of every font which used to be included in the last monolithic xorg. Many people will not need all the core fonts! One of the adobe 75 or 100 dpi fonts, and perhaps misc-misc, should cover all the bases in an English or N.W. European locale. For modern terms (unfortunately, not xterm), TrueType/OTF fonts are the way to go. A look at the intlfonts suggests they are needed for emacs (i.e. for coverage of everything which emacs can support - for UTF-8 users that seems unlikely, all the main UTF-8 glyphs were added to the core fonts back in XFree86 days and only recent things like the new Turkish Lire symbol should cause problems. But on the second point (slowness) - I've seen xorg taking a significant time to start the first time on *two* builds since, I think, last October. I think one was when I was testing things for make-4.0, the other time was one of my four 7.5 builds and I believe they happened once on each of my two main machines. In each case, the subsequent runs of 'startx', whatever the wm, were at normal speed. I didn't measure how long either slow start took (wasn't expecting it to be slow), but I would be surprised if it was more than a minute each time - that _is_ on a reasonably fast machine (phenom, 3.4GHz, and Sandy Bridge, I think 3.2 GHz), so if it is the same problem, a slow machine could well take two minutes. Whatever, for me this has only ever happ0ened the first time I run startx. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page Hello, It puzzled me as well when I got that message on my screen about the fonts lacking as I did have all the fonts installed and were correctly listed. I have not deviated in the least from the instructions in either the systemd 7.5 LFS book, nor the BLFS 7.5 stable book. This was the first time starting up x server and that was the string of messages that scrolled by. As for my system being slow, it normally only takes a couple seconds to startx each time after the initial one. I have an older hp laptop with a core two duo. I compiled and installed xorg via chroot from the host OS which is the latest stable Debian. Before I even started X for the first time I had of course installed the fonts that xorg provides in addition to the dejavu fonts and microsoft core fonts. I only suggested that it be added to the user notes or page as it was a solution to the issue that I had. I do not know if anyone else will get that error or not, but if it was added to the notes section it may well assist anyone who does get it. Regards, Christopher. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts
m...@pc-networking-services.com wrote: Hello, When we install xorg following the BLFS_7.5 stable book, when you first start x using the startx command, it will complain bitterly about the ISO fonts are lacking and it will NOT correctly bring up twm with the three windows and clock. (If you installed the clock.) To solve this issue you need to actually install the international fonts: ftp://ftp.openbsd.com/ports/distfiles/intlfonts-1.2.tar.gz After I installed these fonts I actually rebooted my computer and when I issued the startx command, after a couple minutes twm started correctly and the clock also came up correctly. Maybe it would be a good idea to add this to the user notes or to the xorg instructions page. This is easily verified by doing a completely fresh install and testing. Do you have the LANG or LC_* environment variables set? I've never loaded intlfonts and have never had a problem. Also, you must have a really slow system. For me, twm comes up in about 2 seconds. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page Hello, With regards to $LANG it shows the result as follows: echo $LANG en_NZ.UTF-8 I made sure that I got a result from that right from the start. I did NOT want to repeat the oversight of not setting an important veriable like I did with the 7.4 lfs_release. Regards, Christopher -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts
Ken Moffat wrote: But on the second point (slowness) - I've seen xorg taking a significant time to start the first time on *two* builds since, I think, last October. I think one was when I was testing things for make-4.0, the other time was one of my four 7.5 builds and I believe they happened once on each of my two main machines. In each case, the subsequent runs of 'startx', whatever the wm, were at normal speed. I didn't measure how long either slow start took (wasn't expecting it to be slow), but I would be surprised if it was more than a minute each time - that _is_ on a reasonably fast machine (phenom, 3.4GHz, and Sandy Bridge, I think 3.2 GHz), so if it is the same problem, a slow machine could well take two minutes. Whatever, for me this has only ever happ0ened the first time I run startx. Did you run fc-cache (as root) before running startx? It creates a system-wide font information cache in /var/cache/fontconfig. If that doesn't exist or if it's not up-to-date, it's created in your home directory when you start X. This can take some time if you have a lot of fonts installed. In a single-user system the location of the font cache doesn't really matter, but personally I prefer running fc-cache as root every time I install or uninstall fonts. X starts quite fast for me when the font cache is up-to-date. Of course there can be other reasons for the slowness you described, but this was the first thing that came to my mind. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 15:12:38 +1300 From: m...@pc-networking-services.com To: blfs-support@linuxfromscratch.org Subject: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts . . After I installed these fonts I actually rebooted my computer and when I issued the startx command, after a couple minutes twm started correctly and the clock also came up correctly. Further to the notes elsewhere re font caches c: About that 'couple minutes': have you got networking setup and functioning ok on the machine? Reason for asking is that startx normally will do some networking-related things; and you may be seeing timeouts or similar for those. When you issue the command 'startx', does it output an xauth line plus a blank line or so, then pause for a while, before issuing the 'X.Org X Server ...' line then going on quite briskly to a bunch more lines, before switching into 'graphical' mode? Or, does it get to the 'X.Org ...' line quite quickly and then is slow from there, or what? You could edit /usr/bin/startx to show/trace - even just some 'echo ...' lines - what it's doing at the various stages, and see if that shows up the/any bottleneck(s). hth, akh . . -- -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts
m...@pc-networking-services.com wrote: Hello, When we install xorg following the BLFS_7.5 stable book, when you first start x using the startx command, it will complain bitterly about the ISO fonts are lacking and it will NOT correctly bring up twm with the three windows and clock. (If you installed the clock.) To solve this issue you need to actually install the international fonts: ftp://ftp.openbsd.com/ports/distfiles/intlfonts-1.2.tar.gz After I installed these fonts I actually rebooted my computer and when I issued the startx command, after a couple minutes twm started correctly and the clock also came up correctly. Maybe it would be a good idea to add this to the user notes or to the xorg instructions page. This is easily verified by doing a completely fresh install and testing. Do you have the LANG or LC_* environment variables set? I've never loaded intlfonts and have never had a problem. Also, you must have a really slow system. For me, twm comes up in about 2 seconds. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
Re: [blfs-support] Solution for twm complaining about lacking fonts
On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 09:24:26PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: m...@pc-networking-services.com wrote: Hello, When we install xorg following the BLFS_7.5 stable book, when you first start x using the startx command, it will complain bitterly about the ISO fonts are lacking and it will NOT correctly bring up twm with the three windows and clock. (If you installed the clock.) To solve this issue you need to actually install the international fonts: ftp://ftp.openbsd.com/ports/distfiles/intlfonts-1.2.tar.gz After I installed these fonts I actually rebooted my computer and when I issued the startx command, after a couple minutes twm started correctly and the clock also came up correctly. Maybe it would be a good idea to add this to the user notes or to the xorg instructions page. This is easily verified by doing a completely fresh install and testing. Do you have the LANG or LC_* environment variables set? I've never loaded intlfonts and have never had a problem. Also, you must have a really slow system. For me, twm comes up in about 2 seconds. -- Bruce I agree that the intlfonts are not normally needed - I don't usually build twm, but I used it when testing BLFS-7.4 in en_GB.UTF-8. What particularly puzzles me about the suggestion that it is needed, is that BLFS has _all_ the legacy core fonts, i.e. the current versions of every font which used to be included in the last monolithic xorg. Many people will not need all the core fonts! One of the adobe 75 or 100 dpi fonts, and perhaps misc-misc, should cover all the bases in an English or N.W. European locale. For modern terms (unfortunately, not xterm), TrueType/OTF fonts are the way to go. A look at the intlfonts suggests they are needed for emacs (i.e. for coverage of everything which emacs can support - for UTF-8 users that seems unlikely, all the main UTF-8 glyphs were added to the core fonts back in XFree86 days and only recent things like the new Turkish Lire symbol should cause problems. But on the second point (slowness) - I've seen xorg taking a significant time to start the first time on *two* builds since, I think, last October. I think one was when I was testing things for make-4.0, the other time was one of my four 7.5 builds and I believe they happened once on each of my two main machines. In each case, the subsequent runs of 'startx', whatever the wm, were at normal speed. I didn't measure how long either slow start took (wasn't expecting it to be slow), but I would be surprised if it was more than a minute each time - that _is_ on a reasonably fast machine (phenom, 3.4GHz, and Sandy Bridge, I think 3.2 GHz), so if it is the same problem, a slow machine could well take two minutes. Whatever, for me this has only ever happ0ened the first time I run startx. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
