Gentoo, KDE 4.1, and Font Issues

December 20, 2008 at 2:21 pm (computer maintenance, gentoo) (, , , , )

Update [01/3/2009] : Eventually I was able to fix the problem :) .

For a few weeks now I have been running KDE 4.1 on both my laptop and desktop machines. Both run Gentoo Linux primarily and can boot Windows XP (for games). Unfortunately, when I updated Xorg on my desktop machine things got a little messy. It seems, for whatever reason, that the Helvetica font is impossible for KDE 4.1 to load. This is a problem since it’s the default font for used in virtually all the widgets. The reason I suspect this is because you are allowed to change the font on the digital clock widget and if I change to anything other than Helvetica it works great. Sadly, I can’t change any of the other fonts or I would have settled for that as a solution.

I have been trying to fix this problem for several hours now with no such luck. I can’t even seem to locate a KDE log file. The Xorg log file seems to show that all fonts are being loaded correctly. I also reinstalled all packages that I had installed from media-fonts/ and that did not correct the problem either. My next recourse is to reinstall KDE 4.1, but I really don’t want to do that because it takes a heck of a long time. The laptop and desktop have virtually the same configuration yet the laptop works and the desktop does not.  After spending all this time trying to fix this… I must say that it is starting to get old.

I wish I knew more about how Linux dealt with fonts, but I am finding a surprising lack of resources on the web about this. Up until this point I took fonts and how Linux did all that sort of stuff as magic…

Oh well, I guess I just have to keep at it :-/ .

2 Comments

  1. Donnie Berkholz said,

    January 3, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    Try installing corefonts or liberation-fonts (or something similar).

    Reply

    • jintoreedwine said,

      January 3, 2009 at 8:11 pm

      I actually did try both of those because I found a wiki talking about fonts in Gentoo. Eventually it turned out to be some messed up setting in my home directory. I don’t know the exact one because I simply created a new home directory and copied over any important files. It was a hack, but I had already spent a good 3 days without my primary computer by that time. I’ll update this post to reflect the fact that I found a solution. Thanks!

      Reply

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