fonts broken in hoary for old unix apps

[Brian Craft]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 07:56:33PM +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 02:56:41PM -0700, Brian Craft wrote:
> > I have no idea what the underlying cause of this is. Since I installed
> > Hoary, if I run X apps remotely on a Solaris box some fonts are not
> > rendered on my ubuntu X server, typically on buttons and menus.
> > 
> > These are rather old Xt based apps. Maybe it's some Xt resource thing.
> > I dunno.  It always worked fine on Warty. 
> 
> This could be a font/charset issue.  Warty used ISO-8859-1 (or
> something) by default, while Hoary uses UTF-8 locales.
> 
> Do you have any Unicode fonts?  You can run this command to find out
> 
>     xlsfonts -fn -*-iso10646-1
> 
> You can also try to run those applications in a non-UTF-8 locale:
> 
>     LC_CTYPE=C some-old-x-app
> 
> I can't tell what your exact problem is, but maybe this will help
> somewhat.

Xtightvnc was not getting any TrueType fonts. Manually adding the
directory with "xset fp+" didn't work. I eventually found that
installing xfs and setting fp to "unix/:7100" did the magic. I don't
really understand what any of this is about. Apps on the same machine as
the vnc server seemed to run fine. Remote apps were messed up.  Perhaps
this is something to do with client vs. server side rendering. It seems
like the distros just finished transitioning to xfs, and now they're
transitioning away from it.

b.c.