A runaway process yesterday forced me to reboot my laptop after a couple of weeks of uptime. Upon reboot, X refused to start. More precisely, I quickly learned, gdm refused to start. The server itself ran fine. Except when I tried to load my wm (ice). A little debugging showed that everthing that linked freetype (even gnumeric's non-gui ssconvert program) would segv in libfreetype.so.6. Downgrading freetype from 2.1.8 to 2.1.5 (via the gentoo ebuild) only moved the crashes out of libfreetype and into libfontconfig. Then, I remembered having similar problems in the past with bad fonts. So with fc-list and FC_DEBUG=255 I tracked down the bad font. Or at least the one that triggered the segv.... It seems that /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n0190041.pfb -- NimbusSanL-Bold was to blame. Moving that file out of fc's paths allowed everything to work again. Ftview can read the font just fine, so the font itself isn't buggy; it just happened to trigger something when the font path was scanned in just the right order. Fun. [SIGH] FWIW, gentoo at fc 2.2.2. I'll have to make an ebuild for 2.2.94 and give that a try. (Of course, this does show just how far the transition from server- side fonts has come. But it was nice to still have twm and urxvt on hand....) -JimC
