I was updating my KDE install on my Debian laptop when I ran into a problem. Upon trying to logout and login after the update to KDE 3.1 GDM was just reseting and going back to the login screen. So I dropped to a terminal and tried to start X by hand. I ran "startx" and had my .xinitrc starting K when I got the error "/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Get_Next_Char". After consulting my friend Google on the error I found a few leads to a possible fc-cache and freetype problem. Running fc-cache I recieved the exact same error K was giving me. This error was posted to the Debian package mantainer of libfontconfig and he could not reproduce it to fix it. So doing an "ldd libfontconfig.so.1" showed a link to /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.so.6. So freetype comes up again. It must be a freetype fonts problem. I renamed the link to /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.so.6 to /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.so.6.test and walla KDE started right up. It now points to /usr/X11R6/lib/libfreetype.so.6.2.
