Another piece of a fundamental *nix installation that is broken in MacOS X Tiger is xterm. Specifically, the Tektronix 4014 emulation in xterm on the Mac generates ‘empty boxes’ instead of actual characters for text as shown below:

Xterm Broken Display

I found that this problem had been reported on Apple’s X11-users mailing list here, but no solution had been determined. I spent a bit of time looking for “missing” fonts as suggested in the posting, then decided this had to be a problem with the xterm executable and tried my previous solution of installing the program from MacPorts via

sudo port install xterm

Since that doesn’t over-ride the default xterm, I then over-rode the default installed xterm using
sudo mv /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm.disabled
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/xterm /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm

Now Tektronix emulation works and I get a screen like the one below:

Fixed Tektronix display on xterm