Well, I looked around, and actually found an entry for fixed in font.alias, 

nothing suggested itself after staring at that for a while, so I reinstalled xbase12, and all is well again. I don't know what the problem was, but keeping 
tarballs around is a good idea.

Thanks for the help.

Brad

> 
> > After working for a while with no real problems, X won't start up anymore.
> > 
> > The message I get is:
> > 
> > cant locate default font "fixed"
> > 
> > I may have deleted something, but it was unintentional (which means I don't
> > have any idea what it was.)
> > 
> > Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this?
> 
> My guess would be that the font "fixed" is in fact corrupted.  (Have you 
> had to fsck any time recently and lost an inode or 2?)
> 
> Anyway, I'd get a copy of the X distribution and pull out the fixed font 
> from it.  (I'm not real sure where it goes (but probably in 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts or somewhere close to that).
> 
> I hope this helps.
> 
> Later.
> 
> -- 
> Colin Wood                                      ender@is.rice.edu
> Consultant                                        Rice University
> Information Technology Services                       Houston, TX
>