PuTTY: "unable to load font" in Ubuntu 20.04

Question

I have installed PuTTY on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS . When I enter the IP address and click on the Open button, Putty gets closed automatically.

The error message is:

PuTTY: unable to load font "server:fixed

Answer 1

I got the same problem today. So I tried to change the font, which you can see on left middle side of PuTTY. Go to Fonts and change it for Font use for ordinary text; set it according to your choice. I set it to UBUNTU MONO. It worked.

Answer 2

This problem is caused because of font default setting. From the Left menu: Categor --> window --> Fonts --> Fonts Used for ordinary text. change the default font from server:fixed to your desired font family. but this is not permanent. you can fix this problem permanently by editing the file in this path: ~/.putty/sessions/Default%20Settings

change The "FontName" value to your desired font. this should solve the problem

Answer 3

Run Putty from shortcut or from shell this way:

env GDK_BACKEND=x11 putty

You need to set variable exactly with env env GDK_BACKEND=x11, without env it will not work (for Putty at least)

Found here:

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/326331/where-to-set-gdk-backend
• https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/putty/pull-request/3

It turns out that it is happening because of running Putty from Wayland. Maybe Wayland doesn't have that font family or something. Sadly I can't say more.

Maybe running the app like this can help with other apps? Can someone try it? Because I don't know whether that will be helpful to other apps.

Answer 4

Thank you for this. I am on WSL2 and tried many solutions without luck before I saw this. I just added

EXPORT GDK_BACKEND=x11

to my .bashrc and now putty works great.