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Fix run X11 apps in containers

January 05, 2025 — BarryK

Alfons reported that X11 apps, such as ycalc, rubix, even lite-xl, do not start in containers. Try to run them in a terminal, and see "cannot load font" error message.

I found the cause. These apps need to load .pcf fonts, that are at /usr/share/fonts/misc; however, the Xephyr nested server does not look there. It does see the TrueType fonts in /usr/share/fonts/TTF

The fix is to explicitly add the path with the "-fp" option when launch Xephyr, see commit:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/b1e82d7d7b11335b8c88108fc0343ae345626431

...although seems not needed, explicitly added the "TTF" and "X11" folder paths as well.      

Tags: easy