A common case of startx/xinit failure
By Yufei Yuan
http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue93/yuan.html
Many of us gnu/linux users have had such a terrible experience. When you login and type the sweet startx as usual, you only receive scrolling lines of error messages. One copy of the error message is usually stored in /var/log/XFree86.0.log. If you can access the log file, you will notice the last lines of the file may look like this:
Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!
Fatal server error:
could not open default font 'fixed'
I have to admit that I was in panic when I saw this message in the first several times. As an intermediate user of linux system, I was not so comfortable using text console for modem dialup and surfing with lynx. So I had to spend a lot of time on another box and use Google to search for help on web. It was amazing that so many people like me have this exact terrible experience and those replies in web forums and mailing lists generally offer more sympathy than real help. Using our common sense and some research, most of us can figure out this failure has something to do with X font server.
After having done a little more research, now I believe that this failure may not be so serious as it looks. Please follow me by doing the steps below, in most of the cases you will get your X windows starting up again.
Note: The following examples run on my Red Hat box. But I believe they are general enough to be used for other distributions.
1. Check if the X font server is running.
Some people like me tend to suspect it is caused by bugs in the X font server, but it turned out that X font server is quite robust. We can run the xfs script under /etc/init.d to see if the font server is running.
[root@localhost /root]# /etc/init.d/xfs status
xfs (pid 1385) is running...
In some cases, the only reason for the failure is that the font server is dead. So, you need to restart font server like this:
[root@localhost /root]# /etc/init.d/xfs start
Starting xfs: [ OK ]
Well, my learned lesson is don't take this '[OK]' for granted. You have to check the status again to see if it is running. If it does run, you can try startx to see if you can start X windows. If you still cannot start X server when the font server runs, it means you are having more serious trouble. You need to waste a little more time reading on the following steps.
Note: In a weird case, my root partition was fully filled by two huge log files occupying more than 2 GB. The font server dies when it cannot write to /tmp. So the simple solution was finding the huge files and deleting them.
2. Check if the font 'fixed' is accessible.
Now it is time to ensure that the font 'fixed' is accessible. First, we can use command fslsfonts to see if font 'fixed' exists in the search path:
[root@localhost alex]# fslsfonts -server unix/:7100 -ll -fn fixed
DIR MIN MAX EXIST DFLT ASC DESC NAME
--> 0 255 some 0 11 2 fixed
FONTNAME_REGISTRY
FOUNDRY Misc
FAMILY_NAME Fixed
WEIGHT_NAME Medium
SLANT R
SETWIDTH_NAME SemiCondensed
ADD_STYLE_NAME
PIXEL_SIZE 13
POINT_SIZE 120
RESOLUTION_X 75
RESOLUTION_Y 75
SPACING C
AVERAGE_WIDTH 60
CHARSET_REGISTRY ISO8859
CHARSET_ENCODING 1
COPYRIGHT Public domain font. Share and enjoy.
CAP_HEIGHT 9
X_HEIGHT 6
FONT -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1
WEIGHT 10
RESOLUTION 103
QUAD_WIDTH 6
This is the normal output when 'fixed' is available. Here, we can see that 'fixed' is actually an alias for the font '-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO8859-1'. If there is no font 'fixed', we first need to gain knowledge of the search path for fonts. We can use command chkfontpath to look at those paths:
[root@localhost alex]# /usr/sbin/chkfontpath
Current directories in font path:
1: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled
2: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled
3: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled
4: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
5: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1
6: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo
7: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID
8: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
9: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi
10: /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1
11: /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType
12: /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType
13: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/100dpi:unscaled
14: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/latin2/100dpi
15: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/misc:unscaled
16: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/75dpi:unscaled
17: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/100dpi:unscaled
18: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/misc
19: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/Type1
20: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/75dpi
21: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-7/100dpi
22: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/misc:unscaled
23: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/100dpi:unscaled
24: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/misc
25: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-9/100dpi
26: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/100dpi:unscaled
27: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/100dpi
28: /usr/share/fonts/zh_CN/TrueType
29: /usr/share/fonts/zh_TW/TrueType
30: /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts
These are the font paths on my box. It shows that xfs looks into these paths seeking a specific font when it is required. There are two types of important files: fonts.dir in each of these paths, and fonts.alias in some of the paths. For example, let's go to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi, and open the files. The files look like this:
[fonts.dir]
775
UTI___14.pcf.gz -adobe-utopia-regular-i-normal--19-140-100-100-p-104-iso10646-1
UTBI__14.pcf.gz -adobe-utopia-bold-i-normal--19-140-100-100-p-109-iso10646-1
UTI___12.pcf.gz -adobe-utopia-regular-i-normal--17-120-100-100-p-89-iso10646-1
UTI___24.pcf.gz -adobe-utopia-regular-i-normal--33-240-100-100-p-179-iso10646-1
courO08.pcf.gz -adobe-courier-medium-o-normal--11-80-100-100-m-60-iso10646-1
UTBI__12.pcf.gz -adobe-utopia-bold-i-normal--17-120-100-100-p-93-iso10646-1
...
The first line specifies the number of fonts under current directory. Following lines map file names to font names.
[fonts.alias]
lucidasans-bolditalic-8 -b&h-lucida-bold-i-normal-sans-11-80-100-100-p-69-iso8859-1
lucidasans-bolditalic-10 -b&h-lucida-bold-i-normal-sans-14-100-100-100-p-90-iso8859-1
lucidasans-bolditalic-12 -b&h-lucida-bold-i-normal-sans-17-120-100-100-p-108-iso8859-1
lucidasans-bolditalic-14 -b&h-lucida-bold-i-normal-sans-20-140-100-100-p-127-iso8859-1
lucidasans-bolditalic-18 -b&h-lucida-bold-i-normal-sans-25-180-100-100-p-159-iso8859-1
lucidasans-bolditalic-24 -b&h-lucida-bold-i-normal-sans-34-240-100-100-p-215-iso8859-1
...
This file maps font alias to font names. So it is clear that once font 'fixed' is needed, the font server search fonts.alias in each font path for a match. If the match exists, the corresponding font file is specified in fonts.dir. If no match exists, which is a rare situation, the X server cannot start and we need to rebuild the font lists. The rebuilding process will generate new fonts.dir and fonts.alias files.
3. Rebuild font list.
Font list can be rebuilt using the script file xfs under /etc/init.d. Following is an excerpt of the script:
...
buildfontlist() {
pushd . &> /dev/null
for d in $(/usr/sbin/chkfontpath --list │ cut -f 2 -d ':') ;do
if [ -d "$d" ]; then
cd $d
# Check if we need to rerun mkfontdir
NEEDED=no
if ! [ -e fonts.dir ]; then
NEEDED=yes
elif [ "$(find . -type f -cnewer fonts.dir 2>/dev/null)" != "" ];then
NEEDED=yes
fi
if [ "$NEEDED" = "yes" ]; then
...
}
...
start() {
if [ -L /usr/X11R6/bin/X ]; then
echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
[ -x /usr/sbin/chkfontpath ] && buildfontlist
rm -fr /tmp/.font-unix
daemon xfs -droppriv -daemon
ret=$?
[ $ret -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/xfs
echo
return $ret
fi
}
...
For readers not familiar with shell programming, this excerpt means that each time xfs script is run, it will check whether there is a fonts.dir file in each listed font path. If fonts.dir is missing in a path, font list needs to be rebuilt. If a fonts.dir does exist for each path, it will check if the status of any file in the font directory is changed after the last change of fonts.dir. If this is true, the font list also needs to be rebuilt.
For newbies not interested in learning shell programming, we play a small trick in the subroutine buildfontlist(). We can set "NEEDED=yes" in the first instance to force the rebuilding of font list.
4. Fonts really missing?
If all steps above fail. My last suggestion is to check if the font file is really removed by some processes. Then you need to reinstall the font.
