HGM: xboard question

[bob]

I've just installed Fedora 20 on my office box. Wanted to try it there before installing on my Macbook. It comes with a version of xboard installed that is fairly new, but I can not tell which version, because the font choice for default is (a) difficult to read everywhere, looks like a poor italics font. But in other places, such as the "help" menu, there is absolutely no visible text of any kind.

Any idea on what might be wrong with Fedora's version regarding default fonts, or a suggested fix???

Never seen this problem previously.

[hgm]

This sounds more like a font problem than an XBoard problem. (e.g. not suitable X-font available in your system's font cache.) I suppose you are running the Xaw build? You could try the GTK build, (./configure --with-gtk), which uses other fonts.

[bob]

This sounds more like a font problem than an XBoard problem. (e.g. not suitable X-font available in your system's font cache.) I suppose you are running the Xaw build? You could try the GTK build, (./configure --with-gtk), which uses other fonts.

Didn't think it was xboard problem in the first place, it has always worked quite well. Looks like Fedora has installed something in a broken way. Still working on installing everything needed so I can compile my own. Having particular problems with "cairo" as the ./configure output says this:


checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes
checking for CAIRO... no
configure: error: Package requirements ( cairo >= 1.2.0 librsvg-2.0 >= 2.14.0 ) were not met:

No package 'cairo' found
No package 'librsvg-2.0' found

I can't find librsvg-2.0 at all, nor cairo (so far, just started however).

[hgm]

Well, these are the drawing libraries for SVG graphics, which XBoard has been using for quite some time now (since 4.6.0, I think). If the binary supplied with Fedora was anywhere recent, and it did draw a board and pieces, there must be support for this under Fedora.

(It should be easy to see if you have cairo-based graphics or the old pixmaps: the cairo graphics is anti-aliased.)

[michiguel]

I've just installed Fedora 20 on my office box. Wanted to try it there before installing on my Macbook. It comes with a version of xboard installed that is fairly new, but I can not tell which version, because the font choice for default is (a) difficult to read everywhere, looks like a poor italics font. But in other places, such as the "help" menu, there is absolutely no visible text of any kind.

Any idea on what might be wrong with Fedora's version regarding default fonts, or a suggested fix???

Never seen this problem previously.

xboard -v

gives you the version. I remember because I asked for that feature
(very useful for certain scripts)

Miguel

[phenri]

xfont is recommended dependency according debian
https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/xboard

Maybe one of these commands can be helpful.

Code: Select all

yum install xorg-x11-fonts-truetype
yum install xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi
yum install xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi
yum install xorg-x11-fonts-Type1

[casaschi]

I've just installed Fedora 20 on my office box. Wanted to try it there before installing on my Macbook. It comes with a version of xboard installed that is fairly new, but I can not tell which version

According to this, Fedora 20 ships with xboard 4.6.2-3.fc20
https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/xboard

[bob]

Well, these are the drawing libraries for SVG graphics, which XBoard has been using for quite some time now (since 4.6.0, I think). If the binary supplied with Fedora was anywhere recent, and it did draw a board and pieces, there must be support for this under Fedora.

(It should be easy to see if you have cairo-based graphics or the old pixmaps: the cairo graphics is anti-aliased.)

The version with fedora turns out to be 4.2.something, so fairly old. Still working on getting new one to compile. Not sure why they made this so difficult. Used to be able to say "install development libs" during install and poof, they were ALL there...

[hgm]

Note that there are XBoard binary packages available fro Fedora from the Open Build Server:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositori ... d:/xboard/

This is for the latest official release of the XBoard development version (4.8.pre0, as it were), but that version should be fine. It would require the binary library support for libCairo and libRSVG, however.

Googling found this link:

http://pkgs.org/download/pkgconfig%28librsvg-2.0%29