Re: Semi-OT: Speed improvement from fontconfig

[Laura Creighton <lac@strakt.com>]

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 know
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 it
is getting mangled in the first place.

thanks very much,
Laura Creighton


In a message of Thu, 20 Oct 2005 11:57:29 +0200, Tom A writes:
>Hi,
>
>This might not be news to everyone but I've just built the latest
>fontconfig snapshot which includes a performance fix described here -
>http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1495
>
>The increase in kde/app startup is significant so I thought it might
>be worth mentioning.
>
>Here's how I built it (probably not the best way - eg. version number bre
>aks)...
>
>apt-get build-dep fontconfig
>apt-get source fontconfig
>wget http://www.fontconfig.org/release/fontconfig-2.3.91.tar.gz
>tar -xzf fontconfig-2.3.91.tar.gz
>cp -a fontconfig-2.3.2/debian fontconfig-2.3.91/
>cd fontconfig-2.3.91/
>./debian/rules build
>./debian/rules binary
># probably worth stopping kdm at this point
>dpkg -i fontconfig_2.3.2-1_i386.deb
>dpkg -i libfontconfig1_2.3.2-1_i386.deb
>
>Of course the snapshot may be unstable in other ways so be careful....
>
>:-)
>
>
>
>