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 fontconfig was new 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 the font dirs 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! Owen Taylor's suggestion to verify the installed fonts was sound, but it may not be a problem with the font itself but rather just its permissions. Johnathan Smith: I tried to CC: you on this message directly, but I could not find your email address in the list archives. Rich
