On Tue, 22 Jul 2025, Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
So I switched the service over to an identical machine whose principal role was to provide outward-facing services: mail, named etc. It appeared at first to be a seamless transition, until I saw that characters typed into an xterm were echoed horizontally offset to the right, so were largely unreadable.
Can you post a screenshot, and your ~/.Xresources (or ~/.Xdefaults) file? Also the output of running `locale'.
Characters programatically output to the screen are rendered correctly.
Do you mean chars. typed in are double-width, but, anything output by, say, echo(1) or printf(1) looks OK?
I use lucidatypewriter as my STD_FONT, 18 point in deference to my presbyopia.
`xterm -fn lucidasanstypewriter-18' on 10.1_STABLE looked fine just now...
So I turned to a NetBSD 9.2 box, and here I hit a different problem. Using Xvnc as started by the same vncserver script as before, I get the right screen dimensions (1920x1080) but not the font I want or the size I want. It looks like there was a major reorganisation of fonts some time between 7.0 and 9.2, with more layers of configuration. How do I specify th lucidatypewriter font I want (it's there, I can see it through xlsfontas,
Almost all "classic" X programs understand `-fn fontname' to specify bitmap fonts. To use TTF fonts with xterm, use `-fa something -fs NN'. Eg: xterm -fn lucidasanstypewriter-18 xterm -fa 'DejaVu Sans Mono' -fs 13 Run fc-list(1) to see the list of TTF/OTF fonts.
but I don't get told where it is in the > filesystem).
``` $ fgrep lucidasanstypewriter $(find /usr/X11R7 /usr/pkg \( -name fonts.dir -o -name fonts.alias \) ) [...] /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/fonts.alias:lucidasanstypewriter-18 -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-sans-25-180-100-100-m-150-iso8859-1 [...] $ ``` then, ``` $ fgrep lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-sans-25 $(find /usr/X11R7 /usr/pkg \( -name fonts.dir -o -name fonts.alias \) ) [...] /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/fonts.dir:lutRS18-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-sans-25-180-100-100-m-150-iso8859-1 [...] /usr/X11R7/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/fonts.dir:lutRS18.bdf -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-sans-25-180-100-100-m-150-iso10646-1 $ ``` to see where the chosen font file lives.
Finally, with native X on 9.2, despite specifying a geometry of 1920x1080 in my startx script, I get a 1024x768 display. Why?
If your kernel display driver is genfb or vesafb, then X will use the wsfb(4) or vesa(4) display drivers, and xrandr doens't work on those. If this is what your issue is (post /var/run/dmesg.boot) get a better resolution like this: https://wiki.netbsd.org/tutorials/x11/how_to_use_wsfb_uefi_bios_framebuffer/ -RVP
