gridengine qmon font problems

Even after you get gridengine installed, you’ll have some lovely font problems when using qmon. After trying a few things, the easiest is just to follow the advice at this web page and set the fonts to fixed. Note that copying $SGE_ROOT/qmon/Qmon to $HOME is an important part — updating the file directly won’t work. This should be done on the system with the qmon binary (should be obvious, but you never know).

If you decide to try and fix the fonts themselves, remember that the fonts need to exist on the Xserver rendering the qmon dialog, not necessarily the one on the system where qmon is being run from. In other words, if you’re doing X11 forwarding from a remote host to your desktop, it’s your desktop’s X11 server that needs the fonts, not the fonts on the remote host. Thanks to this post clarifying that pesky detail.

And finally, if you decide to poke around and get non-fixed fonts working, you’ll probably need these RHEL packages (via):

• xorg-x11-font-utils
• xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi
• xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi
• xorg-x11-fonts-misc

and possibly futzing with xfs and fc-cache. I tried this approach and fixed the initial error messages from the X server (yay!) but resulted in boxes instead of glyphs (boo) and failed back to fixed fonts.