Answering my own email folks, but seems this is not as big a problem as I thought it might be. When trying to install the separate fontconfig programs manually, several conflicts came up, but I then gave YaST2 a go at it and it wonderfully handled things with no conflicts and now Gimp 1.3.20 works! I think I saw James Ogley's name in the bugzilla about this same thing, where he got the same result. Install fontconfig and Gimp works.
Don't believe that thee were no conflicts - YaST just didn't tell you about them, it did a forced install, which is what I did. This means that your rpm database is inconsistent, and if you've got the ttf-bitstream-vera package from my site, you may have problems with the Vera fonts, because the fontconfig package will have overwritten the local.conf file from the vera package. It's unlikely this will happen though, as SuSE's fonts.conf file does have support for the Vera fonts I only installed it to test is Sven's theory was correct, I then removed the fontconfig packages, and reapplied the conflicting packages, and resolved to stick with Gimp 1.3.19 until SuSE 9.0 comes out, because I assume that conficting installs like this will cause problems for APT users (Richard feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) Now, if Mike F did XFree86 etc packages to go alongside the fontconfig packages, so you didn't have to force that aspect of the install, and I could remove the local.conf from the vera package to make it all good... ;) James -- James Ogley, Webmaster, Rubber Turnip james@rubberturnip.org.uk http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk Jabber: riggwelter@myjabber.net Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 8.2). GNOME updates for SuSE: http://www.usr-local-bin.org