How to configure fonts on a remote X connection (XDMCP vs. ssh)

cygwin;fontsx11xdmcpxforwarding

Connecting to a remote Solaris 10 system over X11 I observe inconsistent behavior regarding the used fonts. I am connecting from a Cygwin/X system.

When I connect using ssh forwarding like this

$ ssh -Y mymachine.example.org

fonts work as expected, i.e. the rendering is very nice and programs seem to find all kind of different fonts (e.g. gvim or emacs).

When I connect to the same machine via XDMCP (to the stock blue Solaris 10 login manager screen) and login there seems only 1 fixed size font available. An Emacs from OpenCSW even fails to execute because it can't find the fonts it needs.

It prints that it can't find a font using following specification:

-dt-interface user-medium-r-normal-m

I establish the XDMCP connection like this:

$ XWin -query mymachine.example.org -from mywindowsclient.example.org

My objective is no to get also proper fonts for the XDMCP use case.

How can I investigate this issue? Can I duplicate some configuration which is implicitly used with ssh -Y for the XDMCP case?

How is the font-thing usually setup during ssh-X11-forwarding?

Best Answer

I believe XDMCP is using the fonts local to the Solaris system. When you SSH you're using fonts that are local, since in that scenario you're the X server and the Solaris box is the X client. You can use the command xlsfonts to see what fonts are accessible to you on a given system.

EDIT #1 - Font path

You can find out your system's font path using the command xset.

Example

$ xset q | sed -n '/Font/,/DPM/p'
Font Path:
  catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d,built-ins
DPMS (Energy Star):

This path can include paths to local directories as well "paths" to other font servers. These will show up as port@host types of entries.

Example

$ xset +fp tcp/<IP or name of font server>:7100

References

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