GTK applications fail to start - xfs restart needed Options

Question

Sorry, not really programming question, but I am not sure where else I could find some help.

After a recent update (Xorg was updated among other things), GTK apps stopped running in my kde4. I have a Debian unstable, updated around 22 April. When I try to run them I get the following error:

ga@grzes:~$ iceweasel 
The program 'firefox-bin' received an X Window System error. 
This probably reflects a bug in the program. 
The error was 'BadName (named color or font does not exist)'. 
  (Details: serial 888 error_code 15 request_code 45 minor_code 0) 
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; 
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. 
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line 
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful 
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.) 
ga@grzes:~$ gimp The program 'gimp' received an X Window 
System error. 
This probably reflects a bug in the program. 
The error was 'BadName (named color or font does not exist)'. 
  (Details: serial 6955 error_code 15 request_code 45 minor_code 0) 
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; 
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. 
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line 
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful 
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.) 


(script-fu:4643): LibGimpBase-WARNING **: script-fu: gimp_wire_read(): 
error

I have to restart the font server manually to have it fixed:

ga@grzes:~$ su 
Password: 
grzes:/home/ga# /etc/init.d/xfs restart 
Stopping X font server: xfs. 
Setting up X font server socket directory /tmp/.font-unix...done. 
Starting X font server: xfs.

Any ideas what could be wrong? Is it a configuration issue? My system has been updated for the last 7 years, so I can have some old settings.

Answer 1

Debian unstable is very... unstable now, since a release was made a short time ago. Major changes and packages migrations are happening. Xorg (and all X related stuff) being one of the critical packages in that process. My advice is to perform a new update/upgrade in order to catch a new version that may resolve this problem.

It's very frequent that after an update some thing will get broken in inexplicable ways, simply because the developers are uploading new, and not much tested, version of the applications

Answer 2

I finally figured this out: seems like xfs is not compatible with the other components currently and luckily removing it form the system completely solves the problem.