Fixed!

It seems that I cannot leave well enough alone. I’m still up (24 hours straight now) and working on miscellaneous problems.

For the longest time I lived with my browser (firefox) crashing randomly on certain pages (DP Review in particular) because of what I thought were issues in libxft2. I suffered through it, thinking there was no cure.

Then, 3 weeks ago, while running firefox under root, I noticed something strange.

There was no crash!

Oy?! This led me to suspect a problem in my setup. Today morning, I inspected my /etc/fonts/font.conf and changed it to point only to my truetype directories. In the process, I removed references to both empty directories and directories containing non-truetype fonts. Finally, I entered /usr/share/fonts and deleted all fontconfig generated files (fonts.cache-1, fonts.scale and fonts.dir)

Voila! Everything works :-) I think….