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List:       gentoo-desktop
Subject:    [gentoo-desktop]  Re: xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1
From:       Duncan <1i5t5.duncan () cox ! net>
Date:       2008-09-07 10:26:27
Message-ID: pan.2008.09.07.10.26.27 () cox ! net
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Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> posted
20080906072011.GA16219@comet, excerpted below, on  Sat, 06 Sep 2008
00:20:11 -0700:

> I've just added xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1 to the tree as ~arch. They
> will be part of the X.Org 7.4 release to come out shortly, along with a
> number of other libraries and such that I've recently bumped.
> 
> Please test them and report any bugs you come across, along with `emerge
> --info`, /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I merged and thought everything was fine... right up until I tried to run 
pan... but from my research it's going to hit other GTK/GNOME apps too -- 
but KDE (3.5) doesn't seem to be affected.

Turns out I was hit by the dix/xfs/fixed font bug, which Fedora folks 
seem to have already hit, so a Google gave me enough to go on to fix it.

You'll almost certainly want to apply the patch (from upstream) that can 
be found on fedora's bugzi, along with the details of the problem, here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=430416

Alternatively, and you may wish to do this anyway, elog a warning 
suggesting people disable (remove from their runlevels, and unmerge after 
testing) xfs (X font server, not the filesystem) unless they really know 
what they are doing with it.  The problem manifests as an X <> xfs 
miscommunication when xfs is started before X, tho it works fine if 
started after X, and the root (according to the fedora bug) is a bad 
update to dix.  Thus, disabling xfs "cures" (really, avoids) the problem, 
by not starting xfs at startup so it's not running when X starts, thereby 
allowing X to use its internal font system.  That's what I'm doing now, 
as I was only running xfs since that's the way I had it setup long ago.

Either way, there's likely to be a lot of people with almost non-
functional GNOME, pretty much anyone running xfs, according to that bug, 
if something isn't done to either patch the issue or warn them to turn 
off xfs.  Luckily I'm a KDE user here and it wasn't much affected.  I 
only noticed it when pan wouldn't load, and started spitting BadName 
(named color or font does not exist) errors when run from a terminal 
window.  Of course it's pan I use on the lists (thru gmane), so that 
pretty much killed my ability to ask about it here, tho I could have used 
the web interface or mailed directly if I had to.  Fortunately it didn't 
get that far, however, as googling the error turned up the Fedora link 
above, and following its advice to turn off xfs effectively avoided 
further problems here.  Pan's working fine again, thus this post. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman


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