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n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 03:43 PM
Hi everyone, my name is Elias and i'm really new to ubuntu. Since last week i'm having this error that is driving me insane. I think it's due to a problem with gnome. Magically (I really don't think it has been magically) ubuntu desktop enviroment stopped showing normal fonts and begun showing squared characters. Firstly i thought it could be a language problem, i mean someone accidently changed the default language to chinese. So i tried to change language, something quiet impossible because i don't know what i'm selecting due to the square characters. So i selected a random language and ubuntu tried to download some packages and before ending it threw an error. Of course i don't know what error. Then i tried to go to the PC explorer and it threw error. Every system task i want to open it keeps on giving me errors. Luckyly if I open a terminal, although the GUI shows the square characters the command line looks ok. The same happens with firefox (if not I wouldn't be able to write this kilometric thread :-D). So that's why I assume it's a GUI problem and therefore a Gnome problem. I made an apt-get upgrade and when it finished downloading all the packages an error came out. I wanted to upgrade or reinstall Gnome and more problems came out:
1) I don't know how to do it
2) I don't want to break it more

So really I feel like i'm naked in the middle of the city while everyone is watching me saying Ha - Ha (with nelson's voice) not knowing where to go. I think the machine is screwd up and that i'm going to have to format it but I would like it to be the last option, there is a lot of information I cannot loose.

Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this boring thread

P.S.: Excuse me for my bad english, i'm from argentina :P

n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 03:49 PM
Sorry i forgot to attach these 2 screenshots so that you can see what the problem is. The second screen shows that the terminal looks good but the GUI doesn't.

http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/9766/screenshotml0.th.png (http://img48.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotml0.png)

http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/2167/screenshot1ye7.th.png (http://img76.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshot1ye7.png)

knattlhuber
September 1st, 2008, 04:04 PM
Please post the output of


cat /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
cat /etc/environment

n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 04:11 PM
Please post the output of


cat /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
cat /etc/environment

thanks for the quick answer. The output of


cat /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

is


en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8


and the output of


cat /etc/environment

is


PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/usr/lib/java/bin"
LANG="en_BW.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_BW:en"

knattlhuber
September 1st, 2008, 04:39 PM
Ugh. I had 'hoped' for some obvious error in the locale settings but they seem to be alright (Australian, US and Botswana English).

You could try


export LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
export LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"

to set your environmental language variables to match your locale but I'm not sure if that'll fix your problem.

Have you tried navigating to System > Prefs > Appearance (Fonts tab) and change the application font?

I'm really at a loss here. You could reinstall the ubuntu-desktop


sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

but again, I'm not sure if that'll help. Sorry.

Maybe someone else has a suggestion?

n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 05:00 PM
hi knattlhuber thanks for your reply. I tried the export command but nothing seems to happen. I can't navigate to System > Prefs > Appearance (Fonts tab) because i don't know where it is (square fonts :P). Perhaps reinstalling the ubuntu-desktop might work but I don't know if it will come up with compatibility issues or with data loss. I'm also lost here. Reinstalling or formatting should be the last resource because i don't have another disk to make backups.

I forgot to say that this PC has Ubuntu 6.06 installed and it has eclipse installed with some projects. Perhaps there is some configuration mistake, but as I'm not used to give ubuntu support i'm really guessing here.

n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 05:15 PM
Hi again. I navigated to the language selection item (I think, is the one that has the US and the German flag as an icon) and it gave me a message box. This message box let me copy the message and paste it in open office word. The message said:


The language support is not installed completely

Not all translations or writing aids, that are available for the supported languages on your system, are installed.

and below that says:


language-pack-kde-en (120k)
language-pack-kde-en-base (3036k)

it says KDE, I thought that I was using Gnome. Perhaps someone switched Gnome to KDE, how can I find out wich desktop enviroment I'm using?. I should do it via the command line. I'm going to search how to do it. I'll let you know if anything else comes up.

Thanks again to anyone that is reading this.

knattlhuber
September 1st, 2008, 05:22 PM
Hi again. I navigated to the language selection item (I think, is the one that has the US and the German flag as an icon) and it gave me a message box. This message box let me copy the message and paste it in open office word. The message said:


The language support is not installed completely

Not all translations or writing aids, that are available for the supported languages on your system, are installed.

and below that says:


language-pack-kde-en (120k)
language-pack-kde-en-base (3036k)

it says KDE, I thought that I was using Gnome. Perhaps someone switched Gnome to KDE, how can I find out wich desktop enviroment I'm using?. I should do it via the command line. I'm going to search how to do it. I'll let you know if anything else comes up.

Thanks again to anyone that is reading this.

You are using Gnome judged from your screenshots.
I get actually the same message (including the KDE stuff) on my copy of Hardy so that is definitely not related to your problem.

overdrank
September 1st, 2008, 05:30 PM
I am going to pop in here and make a quick statement after conversing with the op. If this issue is a joke then end it now, do not waste the time and effort of those trying to help. :rolleyes:

n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 05:36 PM
Well we already chat with overdrank via PM and I already told him this is not a joke. I'm not willing to waste others time. Simply I can't come up with the solution of this problem and I really need help. I'm sorry if it seemed to be a joke.

overdrank
September 1st, 2008, 06:13 PM
Hi and the error says they are not completely installed, this is just a shot in the dark but you may try the commands
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo dpkg --configure -a

n00bubunter
September 1st, 2008, 06:27 PM
Nope it didn't work :-(. I've been reading that Gnome uses configuration files for each user. So if a user has a problem perhaps another one or a new one doesn't have it. Here the problem seems to be more complex. When Ubuntu is booting everything seems fine, the fonts are ok. But when I get to the login screen I get those awful square characters. Perhaps the problem is in another place. I'll keep on searching.


----More News----
While I was writing this post I was dealing with the problematic machine. This time i could copy the error message that pops up when i try to open the PC explorer. It says


The Application "nautilus" has quit unexpectedly.
You can inform the developers of what happende to hel them fix it. Or you can restart the application right now.

I'm thinking that this machine has become too buggy to get it solved. Perhaps the only way to solve the problem is to reinstall ubuntu.

bscook
September 11th, 2008, 10:54 PM
n00bubunter:

Were you able to solve this problem? I just tried upgrading to 8.04 today and i appear to have lost all my fonts. all that renders are a bunch of squares where i expect to see a font. terminal access is okay; how did you solve this?

thx

pmcclure
September 15th, 2008, 10:14 PM
Did anybody solve this? - I spent 3 days upgrading and installing new software and added VMware (that was a day) and all of sudden after a reboot i can only use shell

Giant Speck
September 15th, 2008, 10:25 PM
I'm just throwing this out there, but perhaps it's trying to display a font that doesn't exist? Have you tried changing the fonts? I wonder if you can change them from within the terminal...

dagdo
January 8th, 2009, 12:38 PM
I think its permission problems.

please "cd /usr/share/fonts"
and "sudo chmod a+r *.ttf"

cheers!

magicfab
April 15th, 2009, 07:21 PM
@Dagdo, thanks, that fixed it for a friend in Jaunty.

Cheers,

Fabian

tamas305
April 15th, 2009, 09:48 PM
I had this problem also when the package manager was working and it encountered an error while downloading. All text was replaced with the same squares that he has. This is not a great solution but if nothing but nuking and paving remains than try this.

Hold down the power button and restart Ubuntu. Expect the Ubuntu splash screen to show up. After that the blinking cursor will appear in the top left where it usually does but depending on the speed of your system it should stay there for quite a while. However, instead rebooting wait and let Ubuntu think it though and if your lucky, like I was, the login screen showed up after 10 minutes. When I logged in, the two panels (top and bottom) did not show for a while but they came back and all the text was magically fixed. I am relatively new to Ubuntu so I do not know why this worked but if no one offers a better solution, give it a whirl.

-tamas

jaenmedina
October 31st, 2009, 01:50 AM
OK. Go to etc/share/fonts. If the folder is empty then you need to install some fonts. You can download some from:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/files/dejavu/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.30.tar.bz2

After you download that ishue:

tar -xvf dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.30.tar.bz2

Go inside the folder you just untarred, then go into a folder named "ttf"
Inside that folder issue the following commands:

install -v -d -m755 /usr/share/fonts/dejavu
install -v -m644 *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/dejavu
fc-cache -v /usr/share/fonts/dejavu

After that, reboot your desktop and let me know how it went.
Hope this helps.

robwa2
December 18th, 2009, 02:14 PM
I have the same problem!

I actually post it in Instalation and Upgrades but nobody helps me :(

This is the post

I've been trying to install opencv in ubuntu 7.10 with no internet connexion, what I've been doing is downloading all the -dev packages that the installation process has been asking for and using synaptic manager to install the packages as well..anyway, I was installing packages related to xorg and after that I installed libxkbui1_1.0.0-2_i386.deb all the fonts in synaptic manager turn into squares!!!! .. How can I solve this? Please HElp!

After that, someone told me to uninstall the package so I did sudo dpkg -r libxkbui1 and restarted the PC and now and I CAN'T SEE ANY FONT in desktop or system menus.

I already did the sudo chmod a+r *.ttf and restarted the terminal, but should I restart the computer as well?? .. If this doesn't work what can I do?

robwa2
December 19th, 2009, 04:33 PM
Problem solved! .. I reinstalled libxkbui, libxkbui-dev and libxkbu1 .. after that I reinstalled Pango and everything came to normal :)