DUH, was: KDE 3.1, sid - TT fonts screwup
Well, DUH. The short story is, I got my TT fonts back. I'll put down the
longer story for the record, though, because it's a little weird.
OK, so I am using the truetype fonts located on my windows partition, making
them available to X by having a directory (that is included in the fontpath
in XF86Config-4) populated with symlinks to all of /C/windows/*.ttf. The
windows partition is of course mounted on /C, until now the mount options
were such that everything under that path was unaccessible to ordinary user
accounts (the mode of /C was 700). This didn't matter, since the X server
runs as root and could use those fonts just fine.
Now, it seems that with the last upgrade, something changed in such a way that
kde could no longer make use of those fonts. The fix turned out to be
changing the mount options for /C, to ensure the font files are readable to
my user account. Simple enough -- but why did the old setup work OK until
recently, and why did it stop working? Note that I have been using TT fonts
with KDE, including antialiasing, since KDE 2, through the 3.0 packages that
were once available from kde.org, and now with sid's kde3.1 as soon as it hit
the ftp sites.
Oh, and btw there's something seriously wrong with fontconfig. Running
fc-cache takes several hundred MB of memory, and getting fontconfig to
reconfigure successfully required me to shutdown X and setup a temporary swap
file, otherwise fc-cache died with an out of memory condition (taking out
random processes in the act). This is simply unacceptable: on another box, I
saw fc-cache use half a GB at peak, there should at least be a warning about
this somewhere. You can't just assume that every debian box has well over
half a GB of virtual memory available.
--
Robert J. Budzynski <Robert.Budzynski@fuw.edu.pl>
http://bobo.fuw.edu.pl/~rjb/
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