Saturday 13 March 2010

Annoying error message from startxfce4

Whilst trying to understand errors and warnings in logs from my brand new Xubuntu 10.04, I came accross some annoying error messages on my .xsession-error file:
<stdin>:1:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #Those
<stdin>:2:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #or
<stdin>:3:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #Xft
<stdin>:4:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #Xft
xrdb: "Xft.hinting" on line 9 overrides entry on line 6
xrdb: "Xft.hintstyle" on line 11 overrides entry on line 7
Not critical, it seems, not serious, just annoying. I guessed that xrdb was the culprit and searched for its configuration files:

carlos@molotov:~$ locate xrdb | egrep etc
/etc/xdg/xfce4/Xft.xrdb

There I had lines starting with "# Those", etc. A look at the man page for xrdb indicated that the Xft.xrdb file is passes through the C preprocessor, (whose directives are preceded by #). It clearly states that comments should be preceded by!rather than #.

So edit the conf file, replace # by!and the annoyance is gone!