problem with empty-box fonts in wm borders after novice build of Xorg 7.4

[John Lumby]

For various reasons (which I can explain but may not be relevant) I decided to try to build Xorg from source, on a system which was originally Fedora Core 6 and since then upgraded slightly.    The objective was to be able to use an "nv" driver on my graphics device (NVIDIA FX570M) without having to use nvidia's own nvidia driver which is problematic (and latest version doesn't work at all)

I took the tarballs from http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/x.org/X11R7.4/src/everything/, followed the instructions in the Modular Tree developers Guide as best as I could, and after a bit of a struggle, ended up with an Xserver and apps etc that "almost" works fine.

I built into a prefix of  <not_/usr>/xorg_modular as per the Guide and then set up my PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH all with that (with appropriate suffix) at the front, and that seems to work.

I also ensured that the new xfs, not the old one, is running before I start X.

The Xserver works and the graphics device (an NVIDIA FX570M with driver nv) and keyboard and mouse all work.

But my fonts are not working perfectly.      I am not sure of exactly the complete list of what is wrong but one obvious problem is that, with two different window managers, sawfish and gnome/metacity, the text in all borders and titles is empty-boxes.    I have also sometimes seen one application, emacs, fail with "font xxxx not defined' even though xlsfonts -fn xxxx lists it.     But I think that problem "went away" or I can't make it happen consistently.

I have not seen any problem at all with fonts or graphics inside any window once that window is open.

I am using the separate freetype2 (in /usr/local) but have done that on other system with no problems.

I don't see any relevant errors in the Xorg.0.log although there is one that may be but I don't know what to about it if anything :
(EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /mnt/ahbakup/xorg_modular/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/mnt/ahbakup/xorg_modular/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
(EE) GLX: could not load software renderer

But I don't need GL/dri    I don't think these window managers are using it (are they)?

With one other window manager, vtwm, fonts in window borders and in vtwm's own icon windows are all ok and as far as I can tell so far, not problems at all.      But I would like to fix the problems if I can.

I am really looking for some basic hints :
  .   is the tarball method supported or has it become obsolete and I should try git?  I did find a confusing number of missing and multiple-version packages kicking around and may have mixed levels although no build errors eventually.
      (although I also noticed that my xfs font server was built without FONTCACHE defined whereas the libXFont was built with it defined, so xfs didn't understand the font-cache entries in the fs/config so I commented those out)
  .   does anyone recognize this problem and have any suggestion for what to check?
  .   I noticed a config option on the xserver for --enable-builtin-fonts  -  and see that on another newer xorg the Xorg.0.log says it is using builtin fonts.   Might this be an answer?
  . of course I can send xorg.conf, Xorg.0.log, build output, etc if anyone suggests what might be relevant
  .  has anyone done something like this recently and got everything to work?  How?

Thanks for any help ...

John


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