I fail at Linux.

I tried setting up Windows TrueType fonts yesterday on my Kubuntu Hoary Hedgehog, which didn't work, so I just gave up and went on. Later on, programs just stopped loading. Turns out I messed up something with the font directories, so anything non-KDE based can't load properly. I tried updating to Breezy, but that didn't fix anything.

I can't give much else info, because I really don't know what else there is. Pre-upgrading, I tried launching programs from Konsole and would get a Pango error message saying that it couldn't load a certain font, then couldn't find a fallback font, so it didn't execute. Now it just gives me a segfault.

It's mostly GTK programs, but the Mozilla programs are affected the same way. I tried reinstalling all of my fonts and fontconfig, and like I said, even upgraded to Breezy, but it's still broken. Any ideas?

I'm not sure where the fonts are installed, but if you can download replacement system fonts or find the original files, you boot into runlevel 3 for the plain terminal with no xwindows and manually replace the files.

(sorry, I've never installed fonts in *nix before)

From my experience, ( i tend to stay away from different linux flavours) installing fonts is completley different per distro, and a very touchy subject on many distros.

I am not too sure what this japanese hedghog thing is you mentioned, but it sounds cool.... Out of sheer curiosity, what is it?

Bipper

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Originally Posted by Samuraid

I'm not sure where the fonts are installed, but if you can download replacement system fonts or find the original files, you boot into runlevel 3 for the plain terminal with no xwindows and manually replace the files.

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I tried using apt to reinstall them. It's not that the fonts aren't there, it's that my font cache file for X11 became messed up, so it doesn't know where to look for the fonts. My research has gotten that far, but I haven't found out how to fix it.

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Originally Posted by bipper

I am not too sure what this japanese hedghog thing is you mentioned, but it sounds cool.... Out of sheer curiosity, what is it?

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That's a very interesting interpretation on Kubuntu ;) Ubuntu Linux is a really popular distro, but normally it ships with Gnome installed. Kubuntu is an official release of Ubuntu, but with KDE as the display manager. Hoary Hedgehog and Breezy Badgers are just names for the releases of Ubuntu, with Breezy being the most recent.

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Originally Posted by Hsu

I tried using apt to reinstall them. It's not that the fonts aren't there, it's that my font cache file for X11 became messed up, so it doesn't know where to look for the fonts. My research has gotten that far, but I haven't found out how to fix it.

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Can't you edit your xorg.conf file to check that it has the right folder paths?
Also, could you link to the guide you used to try to install the TTF? Maybe we'll find what step in it caused your problem.

http://www.dinakaran.com/fonts/linux/Linux1.htm
That's not the exact one I used, but the instructions are all the same.

When I used ttmkfdir on the directory where I copied over my Windows fonts, it gave me a segmentation fault. It wasn't until about five hours later that I started actually having problems, which is weird, because I hadn't restarted or even logged out during that time, and everything was running fine. I think the last program I tried to run before having problems was Thunderbird, which crashed when I tried to open it. After that, nothing would work, except for KDE-based apps.

Last time I had font problems in KDE after trying to add some fonts from my Windows installation, I logged out of KDE, wiped the font cache and related files in my home directory (~/.font*), and logged back in to fix it. You might want to back up the cache rather than wipe in your case though :p

Checked around some, and it looks like one user had the same error (ttmkfdir segfaults on hoary) but not the same problems afterwards. No clue how a program that only reads from dirs could destroy fonts. You might want to check (and reinstall) if your freetype (2?) dirs aren't messed up, since it's what ttmkfdir relies on to work on the ttf files.

Edit: Oh yeah, forgot to sugegst what clout says. Try that first.

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Originally Posted by cl_out

Last time I had font problems in KDE after trying to add some fonts from my Windows installation, I logged out of KDE, wiped the font cache and related files in my home directory (~/.font*), and logged back in to fix it. You might want to back up the cache rather than wipe in your case though :p

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I tried renaming the files there (fonts.cache-1, fonts.dir) for backups, then restarted, but nothing changed. It only spawned a new fonts.dir file.