LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Jake Hawkes <jake@infinitylimited.net>
  To  : Martin de Koning <m1d2k3@camtech.net.au>
  Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 12:26:08 +0000

Re: about XFree 4.0...

Martin de Koning wrote:
> (Only thing is my X font server is not working, but I'll fix some other
> time when I work out exactly what its for, grin).

back in old days, there used to be a dedicated machine on the network
that served the fonts to xterms on the network. These xterms were the
ones you see at some uni, no disk, just video card, ram, keyboard,
mouse, network.

The boxes booted and the first thing they did was use bootp to get an
IP, then they used the information either in their rom or in the bootp
info to download a kernel, then they booted. the other thing they used
to do is connect to a font server so that they can draw all the
different fonts.

XF86 used to have an inbuilt font server, but one bad thing about this
was speed. To display a font it hadn;t displayed before, the X server
had to find information for it (searching a list of directories) then
render it. This all took time, and it was time that the used was shaking
the mouse saying "whats wrong? why has my X session frozen".

So they moved it to a seperate process so that rendering could happen in
parrallel to the X server

Now, in the XF86Config file, you will see a line that says:

FontPath   "unix/:-1"

where this used to be list of directories, is now a reference to a unix
socket - kinda like a TCP socket except you can only connect to it from
the local machine (and other differences, like endian-ness i think).

So, you have to have a font server listening on that socket, and untill
you do, it has been my experience that you will have problems running X,
problems like, you can't. :) Obviously you can? Which may mean your font
server *is* actually running.

Funky things that you can do is add TrueType (windows) fonts, which I
have been trying to get going but have had little luck - but that's
another thread.

This has been your post damn-that-was-good-strong-venezuelan-coffee
meander.

:)

--
Jake Hawkes B.Eng, (CSE)

If I had wanted your website to make noise I would have licked my finger 
and rubbed it across the monitor.    -- istartedi (slashdot user)

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject