Re: Semi-OT: Speed improvement from fontconfig

[Josh Metzler <joshdeb@metzlers.org>]

On Thursday 20 October 2005 08:11 am, Laura Creighton wrote:
> 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.

This seems fairly strange to me.  libfontconfig.a is part of the 
libfontconfig1-dev and is a static library.  Its only use is to statically 
link it into other applications or libraries.  It should not affect kde at 
all, as kde is dynamically linked to fontconfig and so 
uses /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.

So, are you sure that removing/renaming that file is what fixes your 
problem?  Could it just be restarting kde that is doing it?

If it is that file that is causing you problems, uninstalling 
libfontconfig1-dev should remove it from your system.

Josh