[Linux] "startx" doesn't work anymore

[joshuacolvin@springmail.com]

Hello everyone:

I've been happily using Red Hat 6.2 since it came out, and decided it was time to do something about those ugly fonts. So I read the "Font Deuglification" HOWTO.

Using X before I touched anything worked great (except the fonts were pretty ugly).

I changed the following:

1) installed the 100dpi RPM from the RH CD
2) added a font path to my XF86Config file for
the 100dpi as per the HOWTO. (and yup, I checked for typos, etc.)

I restarted X and everything worked great. My fonts even looked better!

I powered down my computer, went to bed, woke-up, turned it back on, and now "startx" doesn't work at all. I get this msg:

_FontTransSocketUNIXConnect: Can't connect: errno = 111
Fatal Server Error: could not open default font 'fixed'
X connection to :0.0 broken

I grepped for "fixed" and couldn't find it in any nearby X config files. It's certainly not in my FontPath in the XF86Config file, so apparently X looks in many places to decide what fonts to load (which is unwise IMHO). I also grepped for the "_FontTrans" from above and that didn't yield anything either.

I undid my single line changed, but that didn't solve anything.

I've never had to reinstall Linux to fix a problem but I'd be willing, since the single file I changed I changed back the way it was but X is still broken. God knows what RH did when I installed the 100dpi RPM, and I didn't feel like recursively grepping all 5 billion exotically located files for a recent change date to see what exactly it did change. 

I use KDE if that matters at all.

Any ideas? I was just toying with the idea of using my own apache web server to host my webpages when this happened. HA! Time to rethink that...

I couldn't find any useful info on the web for this specific problem.

Thanks as always for any help.
Josh
joshuacolvin@springmail.com