The font sizes for the gdm login screen became very large (~50% more than normal) after installing Gnome 2.4 on my system. There is a forum thread discussing this here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=86587 After having font problems with Dia (see bug #30651), I reverted Pango back to version 1.2.3 (from 1.2.5 that was installed with Gnome 2.4). After that, font sizes in gdm have returned to normal. There seems to be various rarities with the Pango ebuild, as an "emerge =pango-1.2.3" seems to remove version 1.2.5, whereas "emerge -u pango" just adds 1.2.5 without removing 1.2.3. The library symlinks are changed, however, so the results for applications are just the same. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Portage 2.0.49-r3 (default-x86-1.4, gcc-3.2.3, glibc-2.3.2-r1, 2.4.20-gentoo-r7)================================================================= System uname: 2.4.20-gentoo-r7 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.00GHz ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium2 -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -pipe" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" COMPILER="gcc3" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /var/qmail/control /usr/share/config /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb /opt/tomcat/conf /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config/ /usr/share/texmf/tex/platex/config/" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium2 -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoaddcvs ccache fixpackages sandbox userpriv" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.linux.no/ http://trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/gentoo/ http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu" MAKEOPTS="-j2" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 apm encode foomaticdb jpeg libg++ mad mikmod mmx ncurses nls quicktime xml2 xmms zlib gtkhtml gdbm berkdb slang readline tetex bonobo tcltk guile mysql sdl gpm tcpd pam libwww ssl perl python esd imlib motif opengl cdr apache2 avi cups dga doc emacs evo gnome gif gtk innodb java mozilla mozsvg mpeg oggvorbis oss pdflib pic png samba sis spell sse truetype usb X xv -alsa -arts -crypt -kde -svga -qt"
FYI. I've opened a Gnome bug report on this issue: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125521
resolving UPSTREAM is this still a problem btw ?
Yes, this is still an issue for me. Isn't it for everyone? It seems like it should be, but I guess there is something more at work here. Anyway, the gdm maintainers changed the font sizes in the default themes with release 2.4.4.3. My guess is that this was some kind of "fix" for this issue, but they have yet to respond to the Gnome bug I filed in October (mentioning that this seems to be a pango issue)...
no actually it isn't a problem it seems, you are the only one i heard of. Usually font size changes can be triggered by dpi settings, but besides that it seems unlikely to me that it has a direct link to changes in pango. So the 2.4.4.x versions in portage fix this for you ? For me the update 2.4.1->2.4 .4 didn't change anything in the visible font size iirc.
Haven't tried the 2.4.4.x versions, just read the ChangeLog in the gdm release notes. I've been playing around with the DPI settings to no avail previously. I know it seems far-fetched that a pango update should be related to this, but I had the same problem in Dia (mentioned above) and indeed a pango downgrade DID solve both the issues at once (no other packages or configurations changed). Also, a bug comment by the Dia maintainer set me on track for this one.
