%general-entities; ]> $LastChangedBy: $ $Date: $ Until recently (relatively speaking) almost every X Window installation you performed or came across was installed in the /usr/X11R6 directory. That was the standard for years. Developers picked up on this and wrote their package installation scripts looking for X in the standard location. Things have changed and the trend is to now install X in /usr. Some people want to install it in a custom location. Many package developers have not caught up to the change and their packages are still trying to find X in /usr/X11R6 and subsequently fail when you try to build the package. Though for most packages it is not difficult to 'hack' the installation script to fix the problem, that is not the long term solution to the problem. Upstream developers need to modernize their installation scripts and eliminate the problem altogether. Until then, you can create a symbolic link to satisfy the /usr/X11R6 requirement so that you won't be inconvenienced with a package build failure due to this known issue. If you wish to create the symlink, issue the following command as the root user (ensure you modify <$XORG_PREFIX> appropriately): ln -vsf <$XORG_PREFIX> /usr/X11R6 TrueType Fonts Xft provides antialiased font rendering through Freetype, and fonts are controlled from the client side using Fontconfig. The default search path is /usr/share/fonts and ~/.fonts. Fontconfig searches directories in its path recursively and maintains a cache of the font characteristics in fonts.cache-1 files in each directory. If the cache appears to be out of date, it is ignored, and information is (slowly) fetched from the fonts themselves. This cache can be regenerated using the fc-cache command at any time. You can see the list of fonts known by Fontconfig by running the command fc-list. If you've installed Xorg in any prefix other than /usr, the X fonts were not installed in a location known to Fontconfig. This prevents Fontconfig from using the poorly rendered Type 1 fonts or the non-scalable bitmapped fonts. Symlinks were created from the OTF and TTF X font directories to /usr/share/fonts/X11-{OTF,TTF}. This allows Fontconfig to use the OpenType and TrueType fonts provided by X (which are scalable and of higher quality). Fontconfig uses names such as "Monospace 12" to define fonts. Applications generally use generic font names such as "Monospace", "Sans" and "Serif". Fontconfig resolves these names to a font that has all characters that cover the orthography of the language indicated by the locale settings. Knowledge of these font names is included in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Fonts that are not listed in this file are still usable by Fontconfig, but they will not be accessible by the generic family names. Standard scalable fonts that come with X provide very poor Unicode coverage. You may notice in applications that use Xft that some characters appear as a box with four binary digits inside. In this case, a font set with the available glyphs has not been found. Other times, applications that don't use other font families by default and don't accept substitutions from Fontconfig will display blank lines when the default font doesn't cover the orthography of the user's language. This happens, e.g., with Fluxbox in the ru_RU.KOI8-R locale. In order to provide greater Unicode coverage, it is recommended that you install these fonts: DejaVu fonts - These fonts are replacements for the Bitstream Vera fonts and provide Latin-based scripts with accents and Cyrillic glyphs. FreeFont - This set of fonts covers nearly every non-CJK character, but is not visually pleasing. Fontconfig will use it as a last resort to substitute generic font family names. Microsoft Core fonts - These fonts provide slightly worse Unicode coverage than FreeFont, but are better hinted. Be sure to read the license before using them. These fonts are listed in the aliases in the /etc/fonts/fonts.d directory by default. Firefly New Sung font - This font provides Chinese coverage. This font is listed in the aliases in the the /etc/fonts/fonts.d directory by default. Arphic fonts - A similar set of Chinese fonts to the Firefly New Sung font. These fonts are listed in the aliases in the /etc/fonts/fonts.d directory by default. Kochi fonts - These provide Japanese characters, and are listed in the aliases in the /etc/fonts/fonts.d directory by default. Baekmuk fonts - These fonts provide Korean coverage, and are listed in the aliases in the /etc/fonts/fonts.d directory by default. The list above will not provide complete Unicode coverage. For more information, please visit the Unicode Font Guide. As an example, consider the installation of the DejaVu fonts. From the unpacked source directory, run the following commands as the root user: install -v -d -m755 /usr/share/fonts/dejavu && install -v -m644 *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/dejavu && fc-cache -v /usr/share/fonts/dejavu For most hardware configurations, modern Xorg will automatically get the server configuration correct without any user intervention. There are, however, some cases where auto-configuration will be incorrect. Following are some example manual configuration items that may be of use in these instances. For most input devices, no additional configuration will be necessary. This section is provided for informational purposes only. A sample default XKB setup could look like the following (executed as the root user): cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/xkb-defaults.conf << "EOF" Section "InputClass" Identifier "XKB Defaults" MatchIsKeyboard "yes" Option "XkbOptions" "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp" EOF Again, with modern Xorg, little or no additional configuration is necessary. If you should need extra options passed to your video driver, for instance, you could use something like the following (again, executed as the root user): cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/videocard-0.conf << "EOF" Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "radeon" VendorName "Videocard vendor" BoardName "ATI Radeon 7500" Option "NoAccel" "true" EndSection EOF Another common setup is having multiple server layouts for use in different environments. Though the server will automatically detect the presence of another monitor, it may get the order incorrect: cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/server-layout.conf << "EOF" Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "DefaultLayout" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen1" LeftOf "Screen0" Option "Xinerama" EndSection EOF