Re: I can't visualize any file in the Emacs

[Robert Thorpe]

On Jan 29, 1:57 pm, Amanda Ortega <amandaort...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I'm starting to use Emacs, but I can't visualize any file. I only can see
> small squares where it would have to be chars (letters, numbers, etc). I
> don't know what to do. Do I have to install any other package? I have
> installed these packages until now:
>
> emacs21
> emacs21-bin-common
> emacs21-common
> emacsen-common

Normally Emacs should work out of the box without doing this for any 
sensible character-set.  But there seems to be a bug in the packaging 
of some distros, especially Debian and Ubuntu.  I think that you are 
seeing the effects of this bug, though I can't be sure.

See the Debian bug
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=352811 and the Ubuntu 
bug https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/53038 .
There has been quite a lot of discussion about where to best fix it.  
See the threads for details.

It affects every part of X on the relevant distributions.  Type 
"xfontsel" to see what I mean.
The problem is fonts used to be in /usr/share/X11/fonts/ now they are 
in /usr/share/fonts/X11/, the config file xorg.conf was not updated to 
reflect this change.

Dave Love wrote a patch to fix it:
http://librarian.launchpad.net/4860914/diff