RE: MEDM font alias woes on Ubuntu 22 (Jammy)

[Mark Rivers via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Josh,

 

I just tried running medm on a Centos 7 machine and displaying on an Ubuntu 22 machine.  The first time I ran it I got messages about all of the missing widgetDM_* fonts.

 

I then edited /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/fonts.alias and added these aliases at the end.  I got these lines from medm/medm/fonts.alias.sun

 

widgetDM_4      -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--8-60-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1

widgetDM_6      -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--8-60-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1

widgetDM_8      -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--9-80-100-100-c-60-iso8859-1

widgetDM_10     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1

widgetDM_12     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-100-100-100-c-70-iso8859-1

widgetDM_14     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-110-100-100-c-70-iso8859-1

widgetDM_16     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-120-100-100-c-90-iso8859-1

widgetDM_18     -sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-80-iso8859-1

widgetDM_20     -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-140-100-100-c-100-iso8859-1

widgetDM_22     -sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-170-100-100-c-120-iso8859-1

widgetDM_24     -sony-fixed-medium-r-normal--24-170-100-100-c-120-iso8859-1

widgetDM_30     -adobe-times-medium-r-normal--25-180-100-100-p-125-iso8859-1

widgetDM_36     -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-176-iso8859-1

widgetDM_40     -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-1

widgetDM_48     -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-1

widgetDM_60     -adobe-helvetica-bold-r-normal--34-240-100-100-p-182-iso8859-1

 

I then restarted X11 with

 

sudo systemctl restart gdm

 

After doing that I was able to run medm and display on Ubuntu 22 with no missing font messages.  That actually surprised me, I expected to get some errors that there were missing fonts, and needing to install some system packages with the missing fonts.

 

I ran this command to list the installed X11 font packages:

 

sudo apt list –installed | grep fonts

 

and got this:

 

xfonts-100dpi/jammy,jammy,now 1:1.0.4+nmu1.1 all [installed]

xfonts-75dpi/jammy,jammy,now 1:1.0.4+nmu1.1 all [installed]

xfonts-base/jammy,jammy,now 1:1.0.5 all [installed]

xfonts-encodings/jammy,jammy,now 1:1.0.5-0ubuntu2 all [installed]

xfonts-scalable/jammy,jammy,now 1:1.0.3-1.2ubuntu1 all [installed]

xfonts-utils/jammy,now 1:7.7+6build2 amd64 [installed]

 

So if those font packages and the fonts.alias are set then it should work.

 

Mark

 

 

 

 

 

From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> On Behalf Of Stein, Samuel Joshua via Tech-talk
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2023 10:45 AM
To: tech-talk at aps.anl.gov
Subject: MEDM font alias woes on Ubuntu 22 (Jammy)

 

TL;DR : Has anyone gotten an exported MEDM session to display properly on Ubuntu 22.04?

 

I am trying to get the font aliases working for MEDM running on a remote machine but exporting the display to a local Ubuntu (22.04) machine. The guide I found (https://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/ssrl/spear/epics/extensions/medm/MEDM.html#Fonts) regarding font alias creation got me close, but given the way the newest version of Ubuntu seems to handle fonts, I can't seem to get it working.

 

When medm is invoked, I get the following alias errors:

medmInit: Unable to load font widgetDM_30

  Trying default (fixed) instead

 

medmInit: Unable to load font widgetDM_36

  Trying default (fixed) instead

 

medmInit: Unable to load font widgetDM_40

  Trying default (fixed) instead

 

medmInit: Unable to load font widgetDM_48

  Trying default (fixed) instead

 

medmInit: Unable to load font widgetDM_60

  Trying default (fixed) instead

 

Note that these fonts in the alias file appear to be pointing to adobe flavors, which may be an issue.