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I'm on a fresh install of x86 14.04, having trouble starting some applications, and the problem apparently has something to do with ttf fonts.

When I start a few apps, for example roguelike game dungeon crawl stone soup, installed from the software center, I get:

ERROR: Could not find font '/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf

I tried a few other apps, what happens is they just show a black screen for a second and then I go back to desktop, and the error reporter starts.

If I start them from the terminal, I can see what the error is, it's not identical for every app, but mostly it shows "could not find a .ttf" or, "a .ttf does not exist".

I checked, I have restricted extras and the actual fonts installed. Tried changing the permissions on the actual files and folders themselves, even changed the ownership of usr to myself, but the error persists.

I can't check whether or not the live system has the problem on this machine right now.

Thanks in advance.

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  • If you are certain the files are there, in the place the app expects them, you should report this as a bug.
    – Jos
    Apr 24, 2014 at 18:44

2 Answers 2

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The solution is simple:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall fonts-dejavu and fonts-dejavu-core

After that:

sudo cp /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf

It might be necessary to repeat the copy process for all the fonts in the family:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono-Bold.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSerif-Bold.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSerif.ttf
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  • 1
    And this fixed it, the apps that had problems all start up correctly now. Thank you very much for the quick and helpful answer.
    – slavmaf
    Apr 24, 2014 at 19:02
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    @Cornelius instead of the copy, you can cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ and then ln -s dejavu ttf-dejavu. Although this is probably a bug in that applications, you are not supposed to rely on the exact position of the font files...
    – Rmano
    Apr 24, 2014 at 19:54
  • Thanks! This got foobillardplus working for me. It was crashing with the cryptic message, "Another error code means that the font file could not e opened or read, or simply that it is broken." See ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2239485 Feb 20, 2015 at 3:06
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Just use this for Dungeon Crawl in Ubuntu 14.04 x64:

sudo apt-get install ttf-dejavu-core
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  • I was here trying to start dungeon crawl, but your solution did not worked for me...
    – Zac
    Jan 22, 2015 at 21:25

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