[PLUG] Failed boot and no startx

Mark Martin mmartin at u.washington.edu
Thu Mar 6 06:30:02 UTC 2003


No reason to panic, Sean.  It just sounds like you accidentally modified the 
"Files" section of your XF86Config file so that the X server can't find your 
fonts.  Here is the corresponding section of XF86Config-4 from my system 
(Mandrake 8.2)

Section "Files"

    RgbPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
    FontPath   "unix/:-1"

EndSection

The FontPath variable contains possible locations for fonts.  In my case (and 
it sounds like this is your case too), the X server acquires fonts via a font 
server xfs.  The number "-1" in my case and "700" in your case refers to the 
port that the font server uses.  Since the default port for the font server 
is 7100, my guess is that you accidentally deleted the 1 to end up with 700.  
If you were not using a font server, this variable would contain a list of 
directories where the X server should look for fonts.

You can determine what port your font server is running on by looking at the 
command line used to start the font server.  A quick and dirty way to do this 
is to read it from the process table, which you can do using the command

ps wp `ps aux | grep xfs | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

On my system, this shows that the font server was started with the command

xfs -port -1 -daemon -droppriv -user xfs

which indicates that the port that my font server is running on is -1.  If the 
command line does not contain the -port argument, then the font server is 
running on the default port of 7100.

For more information about the font server, look at the man page for xfs.  You 
could also look at the man page for XF86Config for more information about the 
configuration file.

Good luck,

Mark

P.S. Problems with the X server are not usually related to problems with a 
filesystem.  So, checking your filesystem wasn't really warranted.

On Wednesday 05 March 2003 18:06, Sean Dixon wrote:
> On a recent reboot my computer freaked out and refused to boot into
> xwindows.  I changed the inittab to login at console and tried to go in
> trough startx and was greeted with a fatal error message.
>
> I was dinking around with the XF86config file trying to see if I could
> get my wheel mouse to work and think I might have screwed something up.
> I tried to run XFree86 from GUI but didn't see anything happen.
>
> Now I am unable to get to any GUI.
>
> What have I done?!
>
> I ran fsck /dev/hda1, but to no avail.
>
> The error messages that are returned on startx failure are:
>
> Fatal Server Error:
> Could not open default font 'fixed'
>
> Could not init font path element unix/:700, removing from list!
-- 
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Mark A. Martin, Ph.D.
Applied Mathematics -- Software Development -- Systems Administration
Currently available for employment.
See http://www.amath.washington.edu/~mmartin/resume/ for details.
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