[Fontconfig] RE: Problems going from RH8 to RH9 (solution)

[Rich Drewes]

I experienced the same problem Johnathan Smith reported.  After doing an 
upgrade from RH 8.0 to RH 9.0, X refused to start with an error message 
like this:

"No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not 
correctly configured."

I tried clearing away the font cache files and re-running fc-cache -f as
some suggested on this list, but nothing worked.  Since this was a new
font system for me I didn't know where to start debugging with strace or
anything like that, and the error message above was *not* helpful--in fact
it appears to be wrong, as fc-cache -v showed that lots of fonts were
being found.  As the icing on the cake, "man fontconfig" returned "iconv:
illegal input sequence at position 205".  (That one might be RH's fault.)
 Typical upgrade FUBAR scenario.  Where's the love, Linux?

Following up a lead from another list, I examined the permissions on the
files in all the directories listed in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf.  To my
surprise, some of them were not world or group readable.  Nor were these
files owned by any RPM package.  It's not clear what package put them in
there, but when I removed them X started working again.  Joy.

Rich