Bug 105528

Summary: weston-launch does not display fonts as non-root
Product: Wayland Reporter: Dilian <dpa-bugs>
Component: westonAssignee: Wayland bug list <wayland-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium    
Version: 1.5.0   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description Dilian 2018-03-15 18:21:13 UTC 
I compiled wayland 1.14.0, wayland-protocols-1.12 and weston-3.0.0.

weston-launch used to work.

Then i don't know what happened, probably I installed the Noto fonts, and starting as non-root `weston-launch` now doesn't display a clock or any text, but on the upper left side of the window there is a terminal icon.  When I move the pointer over terminal icon, it shows a hint - rectangle where one letter would fit, but the rectangle contains no text.  When I click on the terminal icon nothing happens.

When I start weston-launch as root, the clock on the right is shown, the hint over the terminal icon is displayed and I can start the terminal.  Last week however, probably before upgrading freetype and fontconfig, weston-launch displayed rectangles as placeholders for the clock.

Could you advise me, why as non-root weston-launch does not display text?

Fontconfig has nothing special for root, fc-list |nl displays as root and non-root 1656 fonts.
Comment 1 Pekka Paalanen 2018-03-16 09:01:01 UTC 
Could you try comparing the environment variables between the working and non-working weston (not weston-launch) processes? You should be able to find it in /proc/<pid>/environ.

I do not recall any changes to the font handling the weston repository in years, so I do suspect it to be a local configuration issue. FWIW, I think the Weston UI uses the Cairo "toy api" for text, which might have a problem as well. The font to search for is hardcoded to "sans" in the Weston clients/ sources, so if that no longer matches anything, I suppose it could lead to what you describe.
Comment 2 Dilian 2018-03-16 15:31:54 UTC 
The font files were not readable at OS-level by mortals.

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