On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 09:24:26PM -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > > Hello, > > > > When we install xorg following the BLFS_7.5 stable book, when you first > > start x using the startx command, it will complain bitterly about the ISO > > fonts are lacking and it will NOT correctly bring up twm with the three > > windows and clock. (If you installed the clock.) > > > > To solve this issue you need to actually install the international fonts: > > > > ftp://ftp.openbsd.com/ports/distfiles/intlfonts-1.2.tar.gz > > > > After I installed these fonts I actually rebooted my computer and when I > > issued the startx command, after a couple minutes twm started correctly > > and the clock also came up correctly. > > > > Maybe it would be a good idea to add this to the user notes or to the xorg > > instructions page. > > > > This is easily verified by doing a completely fresh install and testing. > > Do you have the LANG or LC_* environment variables set? I've never > loaded intlfonts and have never had a problem. > > Also, you must have a really slow system. For me, twm comes up in about > 2 seconds. > > -- Bruce > I agree that the intlfonts are not normally needed - I don't usually build twm, but I used it when testing BLFS-7.4 in en_GB.UTF-8. What particularly puzzles me about the suggestion that it is needed, is that BLFS has _all_ the "legacy" core fonts, i.e. the current versions of every font which used to be included in the last monolithic xorg.
Many people will not need all the core fonts! One of the adobe 75 or 100 dpi fonts, and perhaps misc-misc, should cover all the bases in an English or N.W. European locale. For modern terms (unfortunately, not xterm), TrueType/OTF fonts are the way to go. A look at the intlfonts suggests they are needed for emacs (i.e. for coverage of everything which emacs can support - for UTF-8 users that seems unlikely, all the main UTF-8 glyphs were added to the core fonts back in XFree86 days and only recent things like the new Turkish Lire symbol should cause problems. But on the second point (slowness) - I've seen xorg taking a significant time to start the first time on *two* builds since, I think, last October. I think one was when I was testing things for make-4.0, the other time was one of my four 7.5 builds and I believe they happened once on each of my two main machines. In each case, the subsequent runs of 'startx', whatever the wm, were at normal speed. I didn't measure how long either slow start took (wasn't expecting it to be slow), but I would be surprised if it was more than a minute each time - that _is_ on a reasonably fast machine (phenom, 3.4GHz, and Sandy Bridge, I think 3.2 GHz), so if it is the same problem, a slow machine could well take two minutes. Whatever, for me this has only ever happ0ened the first time I run startx. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, dieses Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
