update-xfonts-traditional command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix update-xfonts-traditional command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

update-xfonts-traditional: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: update-xfonts-traditional: command not found

Solutions to update-xfonts-traditional: command not found

How To Fix update-xfonts-traditional: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu update-xfonts-traditional is provided by xfonts-traditional package.

xfonts-traditional is:

Provides “traditional” versions of fixed-width fonts.

These are a set of fonts (including 6x13 “fixed”), with foundry name “trad” instead of “misc”, with several glyphs replaced with earlier versions from before Markus Kuhn’s changes:

  • balanced ` '
  • less tall ( ) { }
  • centred *
  • high ~
  • slightly higher &
  • traditional appearance of W a
  • in 10x20, versions of ; : , . matching ` ’ and each other

These changes make the fonts compatible with the US-ASCII character set. (UTF-8 is not compatible with ASCII in its usage of the backquote and some other characters.) With these fonts, pre-2000 documents (including ASCII art and GNU manuals) will render correctly.

Additionally, we provide ASCII-compatible versions of several Neep fonts (replacing “jmk” with “trad.jmk” in the foundry name).

Optionally, this package will edit your system configuration to make the default fonts used by xterm refer to the traditional font.

(This package does not actually contain the bulk of the font data; rather, it automatically generates the required modified fonts for each relevant font you have installed.)

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install xfonts-traditional

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install xfonts-traditional.

sudo apt -y install xfonts-traditional

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install xfonts-traditional

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix update-xfonts-traditional command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.