dapper upgrade to edgy, emacs not functioning

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Tuesday 14 November 2006 5:29 pm, Roy Mayfield wrote:

> I've heard that Edgy is supposed to handle fonts much better, but maybe
> the developers focused on new apps like Open Office and ignored old
> standby apps like Emacs and Xfig.

Edgy is on KDE 3.5.5 now, isn't it?  Packages in Sid along the way broke fonts 
pretty badly.  Maybe Edgy inherited this.  It's possible.  I downgraded KDE 
when I switched from Sid to Dapper (same /home).  The solution was to turn 
off antialiasing, log out, log back in, and turn it back on.

If that has no effect, and it doesn't sound likely that it will, then I would 
try using KDE's font installer to manually reinstall the fonts in question.  
System Administration -> Font Installer.  There is a checkbox on there...  
Let's see...  If you click the wrench icon, it pops up a dialog with two 
options, one of which is "Configure fonts for legacy X applications."  This 
was turned off by default on my new Dapper install, and it sounds likely it 
could be the root of your trouble.

I'd give that a whack.  That KDE font installer Craig Drummond came up with 
does all kinds of arcane magical font things, and really works very, very 
well.  I helped him idiot proof it.  Nobody is a bigger idiot than I am when 
it comes to fonts in X11, and if I can install fonts that work with this 
thing, it's really good!

Plus the obligatory:  the reason emacs is broken is because it's emacs.  You 
can fix this with

sudo update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim

Presto.  :P

I'm just taking wild potshots here, because you two sound pretty desperate for 
suggestions.  I don't use xfig or emacs, and I'm going to skip Edgy and wait 
for the next LTS I think.  (I got sick of stability problems, which is why I 
finally gave up Debian Sid after a really long, good run with my old pal 
Sid.)

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre 

Author of Rosegarden Companion http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/
See my new music stand unfolding at http://users.adelphia.net/~silvan/