[arch] Font problems after pacman -Syu

[A. S. Budden]

On 15/12/06, CtM <ctmlinux at rogers.com> wrote:
> A. S. Budden wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I recently moved house and, after my computer had been in a box for a
> > bit over a month, I thought it would be worthwhile to get it up-to-date
> > by doing pacman -Syu.  I am beginning to regret that decision.
> >
> > After the upgrade, the fonts in GDM were replaced with little square
> > boxes.  This was (relatively) easily fixed courtesy of a page I found on
> > the Arch site somewhere: I just had to generate /etc/pango/pango.modules
> > according to the provided command.  I did this and GDM started working
> > again.  However, this wasn't the end of my font woes.  I logged into
> > enlightenment and everything seemed fine: the fonts in the Epplets and
> > in my Xterm were fine and everything seemed to be working ok, until I
> > loaded Firefox (or should that be "Bon Echo"?).
> >
> > The text in the title bar keeps disappearing, as does the text in the
> > window itself.  Occasionally it'll reappear (particularly if you select
> > the text), but it never stays there for long.  The same is seen in gvim
> > and many other programs.  OpenOffice maintains the text okay in the
> > Window, but the title/menu bar doesn't cope.
> >
> > I have also tried checking a different login on the computer (using
> > KDE).  The Konsole text is invisible, as is that in Konqueror and the
> > KDE menu (and probably many other programs).  Thunderbird and Firefox
> > display the "intermittent text" problem described above.
> >
> > I have uploaded some screenshots of the problem to my webspace:
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/ycdqt7
> > http://tinyurl.com/ycoovs
> > http://tinyurl.com/yddl44
> > http://tinyurl.com/yg25p7
> >
> > An extract from pacman.log showing the upgrade is here:
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/yggp6o
> >
> > I can find no reference to this problem anywhere, so I am struggling
> > to find a solution (particularly given that Firefox is so hard to use).
> >
> > Can anyone offer any suggestions with this please?  I am at a loss and
> > my Arch Linux is unusable!
> >
> > Many thanks in advance for your help,
> >
> > Al
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > arch mailing list
> > arch at archlinux.org
> > http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
> >
> >
>
> Hi Al,
>
>     I had the exact same problem with the fonts disappearing. In Gnome,
> I went to System > Preferences > Font > then I selected subpixel
> smoothing for LCD's which is the type of monitor I was using. Somehow it
> had defaulted to the option above for CRT. Making that change fixed the
> issue with the text disappearing. I'm not sure if it will work for you
> but it's worth looking into. I have no idea where the setting would be
> in KDE as I haven't gone near that desktop in about 4 years.
>     In terms of the boxes issue, I read that it was a locales issue
> because all of the locales were no longer loaded by default so you
> needed to go into /etc/locales.gen and uncomment the locales you want to
> have loaded, most commonly:
> en_US.UTF-8     UTF-8
> en_US   ISO-8859-1
> and then run locale-gen to re-generate the supported locales. This
> didn't fix the boxes issue for me on one of my boxes, but it did for
> other people apparently.

That looks interesting, thanks.  The locales.gen thing was done on a
previous upgrade, so I don't think it's that, but I'll see if the
gnome settings fix it for the 'new account' and if so, I'll see what I
can do with KDE and enlightenment.  Will have a look when I get home
tonight.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Al