Re: Emacs does not work with new Dell Display

[Robert Thorpe]

Tim X wrote:
> "Johs" <gjh@sdfsf.com> writes:
>
> > I have just changed to a Dell 2007 WFP 20" widescreen display, but when I
> > try to open emacs in Ubuntu it looks like this:
> >
> > http://www.tulsoba.com/pictures/pic1.png
> >
> > http://www.tulsoba.com/pictures/pic2.png
> >
> > I have tried to remove my .emacs file but it does not help. Is emacs limited
> > to work with certain displays?
> >
> >
>
> If your running under X, I doubt it is a problem with emacs not being
> able to display on a wide screen as I think from the emacs
> perspective, it is unaware of that level of physical information (i.e.
> this type of issue is handled by the X server).
>
> The square boxes are usually a sign emacs is having trouble finding
> the right fonts. Try other fonts and see if you get a similar problem.
>
> FWIW I'm running a 24 inch Dell wide screen with absolutely no
> problems with either emacs 21 or emacs 22. I'm running under Debian -
> in fact, I have this configuration on two different systems (at home
> and at work) with two different video cards (one intel, one ati) and
> previously had it working with a gforce2. I've used various different
> fonts - courier, lucidatypwriter, fixed etc. On one system, I'm
> running a font server, but on the other I'm just running with a
> fontpath in the xorg.conf file.
>

This problem is the interaction of Emacs and X.org config.  It can
affect Debian and Ubuntu.  See the Debian bug
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=352811 and the Ubuntu
bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/53038.
There has been quite a lot of discussion about where to best fix it.
See the threads for details.

It affects every part of X on the relevant distributions.  Type
"xfontsel" to see what I mean.
The problem is fonts used to be in /usr/share/X11/fonts/ now they are
in /usr/share/fonts/X11/, the config file xorg.conf was not updated to
reflect this change.

Dave Love wrote a patch to fix it:
http://librarian.launchpad.net/4860914/diff