Re: question about GNUstep on Debian/woody

[Adam Fedor]

On Tuesday, October 14, 2003, at 11:37 AM, Joerg Desch wrote:
> If I try to start a program (image-viewer, gnumail) from with the 
> windowmaker
> menu, the xserver (XFree 4.1.0) crashes and restarts immediately. So 
> I've
> tried to start image-viewer within a xterm shell. I've got the 
> following
> error messages (repeated several times):
>
> ,----
> | 2003-06-26 14:38:37.072 ImageViewer[28372] X-Windows error - \
> | BadGC (invalid GC parameter)
> |           on display: :0.0
> |                 type: 0
> |        serial number: 164
> |         request code: 57
> | 2003-06-26 14:38:37.094 ImageViewer[28372] XGFont: selected font: \
> | Helvetica-Bold at nan ((nil)) is not available.
> `----
>
> What does that mean?
>
> The type-1 `helvetica' fonst is installed....

One reason I've seen the X server crash is when there are a lot of 
fonts available and font_cacher tries to read them all. Some X servers 
don't like that and crash (see 
http://www.gnustep.org/information/userfaq_1.html#SEC30). That doesn't 
really appear to be the problem here though. It looks like the font 
matrix is screwed up. I can only see that happening if somehow one of 
the font size defaults was corrupt or set incorrectly. You can try

defaults read NSGlobalDomain

to look for defaults with 'Size' in them.  Also try

detaults write NSGlobalDomain GSFontAntiAlias YES

which uses a different font mechanism. Then try to run the app again.