Arch Linux

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

After an absence from my Arch system, I tried to fire it up today and found that Xorg7 now fails to load, telling me that it "could not open default font 'fixed'". I have done a "find" on my whole partition - there is no font file called "fixed*" at all on the system. Just for fun, since I have an older SuSE 9.3 on another partition on the same machine, I searched it too - no files called "fixed*" at all.

Does anyone recognize this error, and know what to do about it?

I haven't touched this partition in probably 6 months (long story). I do have a triple boot on this machine, with the SuSE I mentioned above and also Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I have been running the odd update on those two OS's - I suppose they might have crept onto my Arch partition and messed things up...

Anyway, any and all thoughts much appreciated. I am pretty much dead in the water with Arch. I am running Arch 0.7.2, on a 3.0 GHz Pentium IV HT with 1 GB of RAM.

Last edited by mac57 (2007-04-27 23:43:29)

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

Try installing xorg-fonts-75dpi

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Re: Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

Will do, thanks Snowman. I started thinking I might check for all packages with *font* in the name and try installing some of them. This is a good one to start with! Cheers.

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

sh__

Member

Registered: 2005-07-19

Posts: 272

Re: Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

$ grep -r ^fixed /usr/share/fonts/*/fonts.alias
/usr/share/fonts/misc/fonts.alias:fixed        -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

I would try installing xorg-fonts-misc.

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Re: Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

Hi Guys, thanks for the help. I haven't been able to get back to this for a bit but I finally did tonight. sh___, your tip did the trick. I did the grep and sure enough, fixed WAS on the system, it just clearly was not in the font path. I started backtracking and found that it had been commented out of the font path in xorg.conf. As soon as I uncommented it, X11 was back. Phew!

HOWEVER, XFCE4 is totally borked. It appears that one of my Ubuntu updates wandered onto my Arch partition and kindly updated parts of XFCE4, leaving the whole completely unworkable. Happily, I also have KDE installed on Arch, and was at least able to get an X environment back from which to work on the XFCE4 problem. I am now updating XFCE4 completely to the current version - that should restore version harmony and hopefully all will be well. We shall see! Thanks again.

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

mac57

Member

From: St. Somewhere

Registered: 2006-01-06

Posts: 302

Website

Re: Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

Last update in this thread. Reinstalling XFCE fixed the last problems and my Arch install is back to its former self - much joyful merrymaking may ensue!!  :-)

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Cast off the Microsoft shackles Jan 2005

delacruz

Member

From: /home/houston

Registered: 2007-12-09

Posts: 102

Re: Xorg Fails to Start: Could Not Open Default Font 'Fixed'

I would try installing xorg-fonts-misc.

Had this problem and this fixed it.