Fonts screwed up in CentOS 6 terminal

[Red Squirrel]

I have a brand new install of CentOS 6 and for some reason the fonts are all screwed up in the terminal. They are fine everywhere else. The spacing is all weird.

The font I'm using is "monospace" but whatever font I do try it does the same thing. I checked my main server and it's using the same font and it's fine.

The most notable screw up is the i's and m'. I think they are not being given the right spacing or something.

Oh and installing Audacity in Linux is a nightmare, but that's another story.

 

[Nothinman]

My first guess would be a video driver or font smoothing issue. And I just installed audacity in sid last week and it installed like every other package did, without issues. =)

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm using VNC if it matters, though I'm also using VNC for the other server fine.

 

[Nothinman]

Is the other server CentOS 6 as well? If not, the comparison is invalid. Have you checked locally to see if it looks normal?

 

[Jodell88]

The "monospace" font is an alias. It can be "dejavu sans mono" or some other font. I'll try reinstalling the fontconfig and freetype2 packages.

 

[postmortemIA]

this is problem due to smoothing algorithm, not the font itself. perhaps play with anti aliasing settings for fonts?

 

[Red Squirrel]

Not sure if it works locally as it's a headless machine. Tried hooking up a monitor but it wont support the resolution (just get an error on the monitor). It's an older monitor so guess it can't adjust.

I think I'm getting closer getting Audacity to install, at which point I wont really care as once it's setup I wont need to do anything further with the terminal. Think I'll just use putty instead of vnc for now. I may also look at an alternative program as this one is bringing me through dependency hell.

 

[Red Squirrel]

This is more serious than I figured, can't even start VNC after a reboot.

Starting VNC server: 0:gbc 
WARNING: The first attempt to start Xvnc failed, possibly because the font
catalog is not properly configured.  Attempting to determine an appropriate
font path for this system and restart Xvnc using that font path ...
Could not start Xvnc.

_XSERVTransSocketUNIXCreateListener: ...SocketCreateListener() failed
_XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: server already running

Fatal server error:
Cannot establish any listening sockets - Make sure an X server isn't already running
_XSERVTransSocketUNIXCreateListener: ...SocketCreateListener() failed
_XSERVTransMakeAllCOTSServerListeners: server already running

Fatal server error:
Cannot establish any listening sockets - Make sure an X server isn't already running

                                                           [FAILED]

Think I'll just go ahead and reinstall.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Wait, this is all on a remote connection then? The problem is on the local computer then, not your server. The local computer doesn't have the font that the remote computer is telling it to display, and as a result, the local computer picks whatever it thinks is close and displays that instead.

Edit (just saw your last post which you posted while I was typing mine):

I would reinstall VNC on your local system and update your local fontconfig and freetype/freetype2 fonts.

Also, VNC will fail if the ports havn't cleared, which can take up to 10 minutes.

 

[Red Squirrel]

How would vnc care about local fonts? It's just displaying pixel by pixel what the end server sees, no?

 

[Fallen Kell]

How would vnc care about local fonts? It's just displaying pixel by pixel what the end server sees, no?

No it doesn't display pixel by pixel. VNC is an X server, and uses the streamlined X11 display protocol. Part of that is that is simply sends the commands to generate the image locally, thus widgets and fonts are local. Thus instead of needing to send 1920x1200x32 bytes of data for each frame for text, it simply sends use Sans Serf standard 12 point font, write the words "Print this here" at position 100,100 saving about 72 megabytes of network traffic per frame (same with drawing boxes, menus, etc).

 

[Red Squirrel]

Hmm did not know that. I figured it just did pixel by pixel, and where there was solid areas it would just send the coords to draw a rectangle etc... and only sent packets for changes, not the whole image.

Going to try to get it to work with the monitor to confirm if it's ok there. Once this is deployed vnc wont be used anyway.

I think if I set the default init level to 5 I might be ok so I'll try that and then reboot.

edit: nope no go, even after a reboot it wont recognize the monitor. So much for that. Hopefully it will work with the monitor at church, where this is going. I set the resolution to 1024x768 but I think that only affected the vnc session, and not the master resolution. But this thing is such a mess think I'll just reinstall. My failed attempt of getting audacity to work has made things very bad. I must have installed a good 100 dependencies, somewhere there's probably some kind of conflict.

 

[Nothinman]

No it doesn't display pixel by pixel. VNC is an X server, and uses the streamlined X11 display protocol. Part of that is that is simply sends the commands to generate the image locally, thus widgets and fonts are local. Thus instead of needing to send 1920x1200x32 bytes of data for each frame for text, it simply sends use Sans Serf standard 12 point font, write the words "Print this here" at position 100,100 saving about 72 megabytes of network traffic per frame (same with drawing boxes, menus, etc).

I'm pretty sure that even though Xvnc is an X server, it's not a standard one in that it doesn't work like normal remote X and doesn't do local font rendering and such like they do. Doing that would make it redundant since normal X servers already do network rendering and you wouldn't be able to use normal vnc clients to connect to it.

 

[D.plomat]

Hello everybody,

Sorry for digging-out this thread on my first post, i also think it has something to do with display acceleration on a non-physical/"local" display, as i had the same problem on CentOS 6.3 inside VirtualBox, even more screwed to the point being barely readable.

To fix this i just did:

yum search fonts
yum install terminus-fonts terminus-fonts-console

and selected Terminus Bold 12 (somewhat ugly, but at least very readable, don't have time to try and compare all fixed fonts for now)