i start xboard and get crashing error: $ xboard $ xboard xboard: no fonts match pattern -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Not working
I suppose the mentioned font must be in the recommended xfonts-100dpi package. I don't think XBoard can run without an X-font. I am not sure why debian lists the fonts as 'recommend' rather than 'depends'. I guess 'depends on A' means that it is absolutely impossible that it would ever run without A being installed, under any conceivable circumstances. And perhaps it is cnceivable that XBoard would run with some other X-font package. No one in his right mind would ever want to run XBoard with another font, though, having to type something like xboard -font "-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" -clockfont "-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal--*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" (with another font name) to accomplish that. This seems of another order than saying that XBoard does not depend on any chess engine because you could run it as game viewer through: xboard -ncp But anyway, the issue seems to depend purely on the Debian dependency rules, and is not something we could fix up-stream. H.G. Muller XBoard developer
It has come to my attention that problems like this are often caused by the X-server font path not being set correctly. So the dependency mechanism does load the required font packages, and they do have the required fonts in them, but the X-server cannot fin them. The situation can be corrected by giving the command xset fp+ /usr/share/fonts/X11 (or wherever else your font packages are installed). This problem does not seem to have anything to do with XBoard; if anything, it should count as a bug in the installation of the respective font packages.
I am not able to reproduce this problem in the xboard 4.9.1-3.1 package, and I think this bug can be closed.
Ah nevermind, I see this longstanding issue is valid in certain cases, and is even mentioned in this package's patches: https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/xboard/-/blob/master/debian/patches/01_note_about_missing_fonts.patch?ref_type=heads Maybe something can be done upstream to resolve this.
Am 2026-06-05 12:07, schrieb Nikolas Nyby: Why not depend on the fonts then instead of merely recommending them? - Fabian
* https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/xboard/-/merge_requests/3 * https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-depends-on-an-x-font-package.html It is debian policy to not depend on X Window System font packages.