Emergency! Almost all text in Gnome appears as boxes today's software update!

[punong_bisyonaryo]

Anybody! Please help!

I'm not sure if I got a virus, or just a bad update. First, I'm browsing posts in Liferea and Firefox, some Software Updates appear in update manager, 3 updates. libsomething related to codecs. And then all of a sudden, when I open evince, all boxes! Some programs crash, more boxes. I try restarting, even gdm login shows boxes! Now everything, my Applications, Places, System, clock, even the text in desktop icons appear as boxes!

How do I fix or rollback or whatever?

Extreme panic!

[Sunflower1970]

Have you tried rebooting?

I've seen this happen to me before, but it was only when I was upgrading between Edgy and Feisty.

[Soybean]

Well, first of all, don't panic. I'm sure it can be fixed.

Second, it's unlikely that it's a virus or a bad update. Linux viruses are essentially unheard-of, and a bad update would likely be affecting a lot of people and resulting in a lot of related forum posts. That's not to say that it's definitely not either of those things... just that they're not super likely.

So... what else have you done recently that might have inadvertantly caused this? Perhaps something involving language settings... or fonts... or internationalization? Or maybe a new theme that you downloaded from the internet?

Oh, and Sunflower has a point -- rebooting is often worth a shot.

[punong_bisyonaryo]

Originally Posted by Sunflower1970 Have you tried rebooting? I've seen this happen to me before, but it was only when I was upgrading between Edgy and Feisty.

Thanks for taking time to look at my post. It's been a full 13 minutes!

Yes I have. A note, before I restarted, all the gnome apps that were already open had no problems, it's just the newly opened ones. Naturally, when I rebooted, GDM, gnome desktop, even the text inside gedit all appear as boxes.

I'd like to know which updates they were today for Edgy, and how to roll them back, if that will help.

Another note, I feel blind as I can't understand anything on my system (good thing it didn't affect firefox). Menus are unreadable, which includes everything inside synaptic, etc.

[punong_bisyonaryo]

Originally Posted by Soybean Well, first of all, don't panic. I'm sure it can be fixed. Second, it's unlikely that it's a virus or a bad update. Linux viruses are essentially unheard-of, and a bad update would likely be affecting a lot of people and resulting in a lot of related forum posts. That's not to say that it's definitely not either of those things... just that they're not super likely. So... what else have you done recently that might have inadvertantly caused this? Perhaps something involving language settings... or fonts... or internationalization? Or maybe a new theme that you downloaded from the internet? Oh, and Sunflower has a point -- rebooting is often worth a shot.

Nothing new installed except those updates before my pc got whacked. My virus-phobia is getting the best of me. I should know better that there are virtually no viruses in Linux, it's the reason I migrated from M$.

Absolutely nothing new. I have glib, pango, compiled from source (I want to learn gnome programming), but I've already rebooted after that and my computer worked fine. Then I turned my computer off again to go to work this morning.

Before I updated, I noticed that my hard disk light was on for some reason (I thought it was strange). Though I only had Liferea and firefox on.

[irish_flu]

It's not a virus.

It looks like there's a font problem. Can you see well enough to get to the desktop font control panel?

It's located in the System menu (just to the left of your "terminal" shortcut there on the top panel), inside "Preferences".

If you have trouble finding it with all the boxes: for me , "Preferences" is the first choice under "System", and "Font" is the seventh one down in the Preferences menu.

Try setting the Desktop and Application fonts to "sans" or something.

If that doesn't work (or if it's so messed up that you can't tell what you're doing), open up terminal and type

sudo apt-get install xfonts-base

sudo apt-get install xfonts-scalable

sudo apt-get install xfonts-75dpi

and then reboot (or restart Gnome with CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Backspace). This should help if your fonts are somehow missing.

[punong_bisyonaryo]

Originally Posted by irish_flu It's not a virus. It looks like there's a font problem. Can you see well enough to get to the desktop font control panel? It's located in the System menu (just to the left of your "terminal" shortcut there on the top panel), inside "Preferences". If you have trouble finding it with all the boxes: for me , "Preferences" is the first choice under "System", and "Font" is the seventh one down in the Preferences menu. Try setting the Desktop and Application fonts to "sans" or something. If that doesn't work (or if it's so messed up that you can't tell what you're doing), open up terminal and type sudo apt-get install xfonts-base sudo apt-get install xfonts-scalable sudo apt-get install xfonts-75dpi and then reboot (or restart Gnome with CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Backspace). This should help if your fonts are somehow missing.

Well, I did manage to get to the Font (it's the 4th one on my system, I could tell with the icon). But upon opening, even the font names were boxes.

I tried aptitude installing, but I already had them.

I think my messing around with pango caused the problem. When I run gedit from terminal, I get a few warnings like:

sys:1: PangoWarning: pango_shape called with bad font, expect ugly output
sys:1: PangoWarning: pango_font_get_glyph_extents called with null font argument, expect ugly output
sys:1: PangoWarning: pango_font_get_metrics called with null font argument, expect ugly output
sys:1: PangoWarning: pango_font_get_font_map called with null font argument, expect ugly output
sys:1: PangoWarning: _pango_cairo_font_map_get_renderer: assertion `PANGO_IS_CAIRO_FONT_MAP (fontmap)' failed
sys:1: PangoWarning: _pango_cairo_font_install called with bad font, expect ugly output

Funny thing is, even with this pango mess I was able to boot into my system with no problem. It only got weird after the software update. Could it be my mess caused the software update to mess up, making even more mess?

[Bachstelze]

To check if it's only a Gnome problem ore a more broad one, try to stop your X (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop) and run startx in a virtual console. It should start fvwm. Yes, I know it's ugly, but do fonts appear correctly ?

[punong_bisyonaryo]

Note, I'm not very good at installing from source, except those that work after ./configure and sudo make install. Trying to install GTK is a nightmare! Too many dependencies. I managed to install glib and pango, but not cairo. has some libpng dependencies, and I couldn't understand installing libpng. I wanna get rid of 'em, but is there a make uninstall or unmake or something?

[punong_bisyonaryo]

Originally Posted by HymnToLife To check if it's only a Gnome problem ore a more broad one, try to stop your X (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop) and run startx in a virtual console. It should start fvwm. Yes, I know it's ugly, but do fonts appear correctly ?

What's fvwm? I tried doing startx but it only booted my gnome again.