John-Paul Stewart wrote:

> Geico Caveman wrote: 
>
> Yup.  It's going to be a nightmare to figure out what's different
> between non-working systems and working ones, though.
>
> Have you tried the workaround mentioned in:
>
>
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-.../msg266900.html


I had seen this workaround earlier, but had not tried it because I did not
understand what he was doing. Then, when you just brought it up, it struck
me - the modification times (he had a problem with his timezones) was the
key.

When I first installed Debian on this new laptop 11 days ago, for some
reason, I had made a mistake in entering the date (which was set to the
future - Dec 10, 2006, instead of Nov 10, 2006, which it should have been).

I just went into every directory that fontconfig was complaining about and
touch'ed everything. This has fixed the problem without any issues
remaining. This is a major relief.

Now, that makes me curious - why does the modification date in the future
matter ?

PS : Maybe this proves that time travel is possible ? Too many people are
having this issue and I am reasonably sure that not all of them made a
mistake like mine (or the one that the author of that link made). Some
people are reliving a month as we speak 

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