LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Martin de Koning <m1d2k3@camtech.net.au>
  To  : Jake Hawkes <jake@infinitylimited.net>
        <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 15:25:51 +1030

Re: about XFree 4.0...

Jake Hawkes wrote:
> 
> 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.

This is what my XF86Config file says:

    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
    FontPath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"

My guess is XFree86 is not set up to use a seperate font server?
I did specify to use a font server what I configured X tho.