Gentoo, KDE 4.1, and Font Issues

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 .