I experienced the same problem Johnathan Smith reported. After doing an upgrade from RH 8.0 to RH 9.0, X refused to start with an error message like this: "No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not correctly configured." I tried clearing away the font cache files and re-running fc-cache -f as some suggested on this list, but nothing worked. Since this was a new font system for me I didn't know where to start debugging with strace or anything like that, and the error message above was *not* helpful--in fact it appears to be wrong, as fc-cache -v showed that lots of fonts were being found. As the icing on the cake, "man fontconfig" returned "iconv: illegal input sequence at position 205". (That one might be RH's fault.) Typical upgrade FUBAR scenario. Where's the love, Linux? Following up a lead from another list, I examined the permissions on the files in all the directories listed in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. To my surprise, some of them were not world or group readable. Nor were these files owned by any RPM package. It's not clear what package put them in there, but when I removed them X started working again. Joy. Rich