I am a newbie so bear with me. I am running DragonLinux on my system, which is a Gateway Intel Celeron 1?? mhz with an ATI 128 Rage VR graphics card.

When I load up Xwindows (this happens in both Gnome and KDE) everthing looks great, except that most of the text looks like a barcode. Any text under an icon is actually perfect, but all the rest is a mess (this includes the text on the title bar of a window, the "File Edit..." part of a window, the "start menu," etc).

I have tried changing the graphics settings through xf86config - in particualar, I tried using every available type of ATI 128 card driver (there are four of them). All of these drivers produce the same problem.

I think there may be a problem with the default font and if I could just switch the font, then I would be home free. The problem is that I cannot read anything, so I cannot navigate the windows to do this.

If anyone has advice it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Well i think that the default font used by gnome-kde is not found on your system.so it is using some some other font
check out what default font is used by them and if that font installed.the font file is not corrupt.otherwise u can download fonts and install them.
u can even install all the truetype windows fonts in linux.there is a excellent package with kde.called font installer