10 Sep 2007

After doing a fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04 and installing all pending updates via Update Manager, I get an error that starts like this:

<br /> Setting up ttf-opensymbol (2.2.0-1ubuntu4) ...<br /> Updating fontconfig cache...<br /> /usr/share/fonts: failed to write cache<br /> /usr/share/fonts/X11: failed to write cache<br />

I’ve had this occur on several machines, and the md5 on the .iso checks out ok, so it’s a bug (Bug 104553, Bug 122976) caused by incorrect dates on the font cache. There’s a solution documented here, but it needs a bit of fixing:
`
$ sudo bash

wget -O folder_list.txt http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=28956&d=1175696100

cat folder_list.txt | xargs touch

cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype

for i in * ; do touch ${i}; done

cd /var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d

for i in * ; do touch ${i}; done

apt-get dist-upgrade

Another post suggests this simpler solution:
$ sudo bash

find /usr/share/fonts /usr/local/share/fonts /var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d -type d -print0 | xargs –null touch

`