X.org: Fatal server error

[Harald Weis]

> > > A good reason in my case seems to be: all fonts.dir files are empty.
> > > 
> > > Running ``mkfontdir [-e encodings/] misc/''  creates always an empty
> > > fonts.dir file, but with the '-e' option a correct encodings.dir file.
> > > 
> > > Conclusion: mkfontdir appears to be broken, or rather mkfontscale as
> > > the former is just a single-line shell script.
>  
> > I would check and see if you have the following packages installed:
> > 1. font-misc-misc
> > 2. font-cursor-misc
>  
> They are installed alright, like all other packages containing the
> pattern ``font'' in their name.
> 
> In the meantime, following an off-list advice, I've used truss(1).
> I've got now nice truss.out files for two machines (same release):
> mine which is good and the other machine (in fact a desktop as well)
> which has the bug.
> 
> The trouble is that I'm unable to interpret the difference. For example:
> Every line in the bad truss.out file is prefixed with ``2682: ''.
> Perhaps a line number? But of which file ?
> Couldn't find anything within the sources of truss or mkfontscale.
> 
> No reply yet from the maintainer for mkfontscale x11 at FreeBSD.org.

First, I'm replying for convenience to two off-list remarks:
I've created 4 truss.out files, 2 on the bad box, 2 on the good one,
using the following 2 commands (under root in /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts):
truss -o truss.out mkfontdir misc/
truss -fae -o truss-fae.out mkfontdir misc/

After renaming I've got:
truss.bad, truss.good, truss-fae.bad, truss-fae.good

truss-fae.bad is the _only_ file all lines of which are prefixed with
``2682: ''. All lines of all other files don't have such a prefix.
I cannot check for the time being whether this corresponds to a pid.
The bad box is at the other end of the town.

Second, is there nobody (more competent than me) out there who would
accept receiving and looking into e.g.
truss-fae.bad.bz2 (12kB) and truss-fae.good.bz2 (18kB) ?
You know I'm just asking for the very very obvious thing which should
take not more than 5 minutes for an experienced person.

Thank you in advance.
Harald
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FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p2 #0: Tue Feb 27 22:56:09 UTC 2007