huge font-size on xfce4
Some days ago I've noticed that, after installing xfce4 via apt-get on a Debian Lenny 5.0 machine, the font-size was HUGE. I was even unable to click through the menu to adapt screen resolution or font properties. After some google-work I've found out that it has to do with the DPI setting that is given with your X server. On some sites they advise you to modify the DPI setting in the Monitor or Device section of your xorg.conf, but that didn't help here.
By coincidence I've found out that the X binary accepts a parameter '-dpi'. The command that starts the X server (that on his turn will run your xfce4 session) is specified in '/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc'. Simply adding a very low value for the DPI setting will fix this issue. This is the command how it is working with me:
server:~# cat /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc #!/bin/sh # $Id: xserverrc 189 2005-06-11 00:04:27Z branden $ exec /usr/bin/X11/X -nolisten tcp -dpi 20
Note that this also works with '96' as DPI value, as long as this parameter is supplied with the X command.
For the sake of completion, I noticed another issue with the X wrapper binary on Debian Lenny 5.0. If you want to start a desktop environment without desktop manager (xdm, gdm, ...) as normal user (not root), you will notice errors like 'client rejected' or 'user not allowed'. To avoid this, edit the '/etc/X11/Xwrapper.config' configuration file and change the following line to:
allowed_users=anybody
where it says
allowed_users=console