font problems

[Simon McIntosh-Smith <Simon.N.Smith@cm.cf.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

where's everyone gone all of a sudden!? Traffic was so busy last week,
this is a real culture shock!

Anyway, I've got a problem that really comes down to X and fonts. 
Here in Cardiff we've got a network of Sun SPARCstations with
SunOS 4.1.3 and X11R4 and X11R5, plus Openwindows (which we have
no problems with, by the way!). A few weeks ago our sys admin
rigged up our network so that each machine always has an X server
running on it - logging in now just involves the X server starting
up each of the shells, tools etc that you require.  Before, logging
in first started up the X server, then started up all your other
stuff. (for Suns this is the xnews process, and our sys admin
achieved this change by using "xdm", and X display manager. I
believe he used the version that came with X11R5)

The problem is this. The X server does not belong to you, it is a
root process. Before this change the X server would
have belonged to whoever was logging in, but no longer. This 
caused a number of problems, such as the console belonging to
root so error messages and the like were getting lost. Most of
these have been resolved. However, when trying to play Crossfire,
the familiar "trying to fix fontpath, failed, switching to pixmaps..."
message comes up, even when the font is correctly installed and
in the right place. This problem first manifested itself when
we were still using v0.91.0, and didn't go away when we switched
to 0.91.1.  The fonts WERE working until the X server change
was made - for a time half of our machines had the pre-running
X servers and Crossfire failed to find the font on those machines,
while on those who's X servers started up as you logged in
Crossfire still worked with the fonts fine.

I suspect it might be that Crossfire is trying to add a font to
the server when the Crossfire process lacks the permissions
to do this. Am I right? And is there a way around this problem?

Thanks for your help,

Sy