Cannot open font file True

There has been this outstanding issue since Fedora 16 that seems to bring down (if ever so slightly) the overall experience of a Fedora desktop user. When booting your system, you will get a message that states Cannot open font file True, and it may stay on the screen for as much as 30 seconds before continuing on (if you are lucky, it will only flash up for 2-3 seconds before continuing).

The problem here lies in the system font param being passed to the kernel has been changed from latarcyrheb-sun16 to True. Unfortunately, the system can't actually find a file called True. As a result, it fails on load, which slows down your boot time and displays this ugly message.

Bug reports have been filed, but an actual fix has only been promised for Fedora 18. In the meantime, we are left to handle this issue on our own.

Forunately, the fix is pretty easy. We can modify /etc/default/grub to change the font name.

• Open /etc/default/grub
• Look for the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=
• Replace SYSFONT=True with SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16
• Save the file
• Finally, run:  sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

That should be it! The next time you boot, the message should be gone, and you should have a much faster boot time.