I experienced similar problems when running sawfish as my window manager. It seems that changing my locale to "C" fixes the problem. Thus, adding:
LANG="C" to my .xinitrc allowed sawfish to run just fine. I also changed this in my .bashrc so that other apps such as xdvi, etc. don't run into problems. So... maybe it's a locale problem? -- Unable to load any usable fontset https://launchpad.net/bugs/2066 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs