* no button font on gtk1 applications
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Alex. Filed under Linux, Projects.
It was always annoying: In my Debian installation all GTK1 applications such as XMMS etc. did not have any describing text for the (radio) buttons, registers, menues, etc. A good guessing was always mandatory and sometimes resulted in surprising events.
All searching in the Internet did not lead to any solution. Suggestions such as changing the .gtkrc, .gtkrc.mime, etc files in the home directory did not help. The bug is located in the GTK1 library itself and it depends on the localization. Since I am in India and my standard localization is en_IN, not everybody is affected by this bug.
Changing the setting to en_US successfully brought back the missing button and menue text. Since en_US is the same as en_IN I do not see any difference.
How to change the localization?
First of all, check if you are really not in en_US already by typing in locale at the shell prompt. My output was like this:
LANG=en_IN
LANGUAGE=en_IN
LC_CTYPE=”en_IN”
LC_NUMERIC=”en_IN”
LC_TIME=”en_IN”
LC_COLLATE=”en_IN”
LC_MONETARY=”en_IN”
LC_MESSAGES=”en_IN”
LC_PAPER=”en_IN”
LC_NAME=”en_IN”
LC_ADDRESS=”en_IN”
LC_TELEPHONE=”en_IN”
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_IN”
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”en_IN”
LC_ALL=
As far as I know, at least Debian and Ubuntu distributions are affected. To change these values to en_US in Debian perform the following steps. If you have Ubuntu installed, proceed to step 2.
- At the shell prompt and as root type in dpkg-reconfigure locales and tick in the list en_US (UTF-8). Remove the star in front of en_IN and proceed to the next screen. Choose here en_US as your default language for the system.
- Open .bashrc (in your home directory) in an editor of your choice and add the lines
export LANG=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_USIf the lines are already there, change them.
- You might get a lot of error messages, run locale-gen as root.
- I made the experience that changing the language in the graphical login screen also avoid the bug. Instead of en_IN, I have chosen POSIX en or something similar. Try it out…
I hope this could solve also your problem with the missing fonts. Let me know, if you have any suggestions.
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:44 pm
thanx a lot for the fix man
.. finally gtk apps working the way they should 
, owe you bigtime .
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September 26th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Hello,
I have a similar problem; instead of the text I have lots of squares!
I followed your instructions except I don’t understand the last one :
“changing the language in the graphical login screen also avoid the bug. Instead of en_IN, I have chosen POSIX en or something similar. Try it out…”
Can you help me out?
Thanks!!
Abby
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September 27th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Hi Abby,
What I am talking about is the graphical login screen GDM, KDM or XDM, where you can type in username and password to login into the graphical part of your distribution. Some of the distribuions start those login managers automatically, others dont have them and the user type in “startx” in the console to start the X-Server.
If the X-Server is started automatically at boot up, then you can see some additional buttons in the login screen such as “Language”, “Session” and “Options” (or similar). You can change and save the lanhuage setting there.
But it seems you have a UTF8 problem. Maybe you should also read this: http://www.linuxcompatible.org/thread27498-1.html
Let me know, if it worked.
Jitu
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November 6th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Thanks a Ton good find bro
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June 4th, 2008 at 2:19 am
Brilliant !!!! .. Thanks a lot dude .. I had been trying in vain to get my torcs installer to work with the text appearing properly .. this worked fine for me .. thankssss !!!!!
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