Other [SOLVED] Trouble with fvwm3

[schweikh]

I have a hybrid 14.2 system (mixed pkg and ports, yeah, I know, but still up-to-date...) and for some time now, maybe a month or two, after some package upgrades, fvwm3 has lost the ability to use fonts other than what looks like X11's "fixed" font for window titles and menus. I was using xft rendered fonts just fine before that happened. My font path is proper. I have not messed with fvwm3 configuration. Other apps like xterm work fine, started from the same .xinitrc.

I noticed that after a recent upgrade of x11-fonts/fontconfig, fvwm3 would output "FcInit() has not been called". After patching fvwm3 to call that function, the message went away, but it still would use only the fixed font.

Then I decided to install 15-STABLE on a different box to get a really clean system. There fvwm3 would for some reason exit immediately and terminate the X session.

Has anyone else seen similar issues or knows what's going on? I'm out of hypotheses.

 

[SirDice]

but still up-to-date...

It's not. 14.2 is EoL since the end of September last year.

maybe a month or two, after some package upgrades

So, right after 14.2 was EoL and the packages started to be built for 14.3?

Then I decided to install 15-STABLE on a different box to get a really clean system. There fvwm3 would for some reason exit immediately and terminate the X session.

That sounds like a graphics driver issue.

 

[schweikh]

The fallback to "fixed" was caused by XFT font specifications in my fvwm rc that had an explicit ":encoding=..." part. In the past, the XFT machinery has mostly ignored this, but apparently has started to consider the font spec invalid and use fixed. XFT derives the encoding from the locale environment variables (LC_*) and does not need an explicit encoding.
If you observe the same effect, make sure your font specification is entirely proper and everything should be back to normal.