[svlug] Font problem

[Akkana Peck]

Sanatan Rai writes:
> Hi all,
>    I have a peculiar problem. Periodically, the fonts on the apps
> `turn small'. By this I mean
> that already running apps are not affected, but newly started apps
> come up with very small

Some desktop programs run daemons that are supposed to keep track of
the theme (fonts, colors etc.) apps should use. I've occasionally
had problems when mixing apps from different desktops. I don't run
any desktop (just the openbox window manager), but several years
ago I had a problem where running an XFCE volume control app would
change the fonts in all my *running* GTK programs like xchat.
Killing the volume control app didn't change the fonts back.
It turned out XFCE had started a service called xfce-mcs-manager:
http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/linux/xfce-mcs-manager.html

I'm sure that's not the exact problem you're seeing, but it might
be something similar, might give you an idea of what to look for.
Are the affected apps all from the same desktop, e.g. all Gnome/GTK
apps? Is it possible you've started up a competing app recently?

You could even try running something like this periodically:
  ps | awk '{print $5;}' | sort > ps.out
then as soon as you notice the font change, immediately run
  ps | awk '{print $5;}' | sort > ps.new

Then you can diff the two process lists and see if there are any
suspicious new processes you didn't ask for.

	...Akkana