[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

all my fonts go away.



I have a recurring problem.  Some debian package which I am automatically
updating is destroying something so that all my KDE applications have
no fonts at all.  I get nothing but silly little boxes.  Xterm
windows, and firefox display fine -- this seems to be a purely debian
problem.

The fonts are there.  The symptom shows up when I log out of this machine
(which, being my home server, I mostly never do) in order to let somebody
else log on to the console, or I want to do something in single user mode.
Then, _pow_, next time kde starts up, no fonts.  This means I have no
idea what package update does this.  The symptoms do not show up close
enough in time to when I make the offending change for me to track it.
This problem only happens 3 or 4 times a year.

dpkg -reconfigure kde
dpkg -reconfigure fontconfig

have not succeeded in fixing the problem.

In the past, unselecting kde, and making a list of all packages that
then were deslected, on paper, by hand, because they depended on kde
and then deslecting them and making the similar list, until the
whole site was more or less naked and then reinstalling all the
packages has fixed the problem.  But it takes 2 days.

I am hoping that there is a KDE command that runs things in a
super-verbose mode with logging so that I can find out what is
actually failing when it goes off and tries to find fonts.  Also,
a kde command that says 'I know that I am in a situation that
_cannot happen_, but, just for fun, reload all the fonts again
anyhow' would be really useful.  Any secret commands that I do
not know about?

I really, truly believe that KDE should have one ascii font
always loaded independent of fontconfig, so that one always has
something to read should you get the sort of catastrophic failure
I am suffering from. 

Speaking of commands unknown to me, a debian command that says, 'find
out every package I have loaded and reinstall every last one of them a
second time' would also be useful.  I don't know any command like that,
or a way to get aptitude to spit out a list of all the packages I have
installed into a file someplace where I can make a script out of this.

Any other suggestions as to how to find out what is going wrong here,
or else, how to build a 'push here to fix everything' command that
works regardless of how things got broken, warmly appreciated.

thank you for your time,
Laura Creighton the most frustrated



Reply to: