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Re: History of Ubuntu X Problem - locales, etc... [long]



That sucks... I've been there.  Although when it comes to crapping all
over itself because of a *harmless* update, my distro of choice is
Debian...

Was there a question?  Sounds like you at least have the blaze under
control... Have you tried creating a new user and logging into Gnome using
their account?  I've had my configuration get screwed up by updates making
things (seemingly) unusable.  Perhaps an 'apt-get remove --purge' of xorg
and gnome and then a reinstall?

Silly suggestion, but did you try to regenerate(rebuild) your font cache?

Have you run any diagnostics against the drives?  Notice any I/Os in the
logs?

You know, you could always upgrade it to a doorstop...



> Well, as you may guess, I am on a new Odyssey...  As I explained a few
> minutes ago, I've had an Ubuntu system running "Hardy Heron" for like
> forever (at least a couple of years).  I have a few CRON jobs that this
> machine runs to do some backups within my household network and monitor a
> few Usenet groups, downloading things that satisfy certain
> criteria.  Everything's automated and has been running smoothly for well
> over a year.  I just wrote about the X server crashing problem, but though
> I should reveal the "rest of the story" (as Paul Harvey used to say -
> showing my age...).  About three weeks ago, I happened to pop over to that
> machine and noticed a synaptic icon indicating that there were a few
> updates needed (I try to check and make sure the system stays current at
> least monthly to 6 weeks or so...  or so...).  Anyway, this update was
> rather major, requiring a couple of kernel thingys - I didn't really pay
> attention to what was being updated, it's always been such a routine thing
> and have never had any problems...  I told it to update whatever was
> needing updating and after it was done, synaptic asked me to reboot.
> Well,
> in my ps job listing, I noted there were a couple of running processes I
> didn't want killed yet; so I opted to wait.  Then I got distracted (
> ...for
> a few days... ) and forgot about it until the weekend rolled around (still
> some two or three weeks ago).  I popped over to the machine in question
> and
> remembered I needed to reboot it (memory prompted by that little icon) -
> but again, I checked my processes and was in the middle of one, so I
> waited.  I also noticed a weird 'question mark icon' in my synaptic area
> of
> the toolbar and hovering the mouse pointer over it showed me there was an
> error with some package repository or something.  Turned out that I have
> an
> ATI Radeon 7000VE card and the proprietary ATI repository had changed
> (that
> took me about an hour to figure out).  Got that solved and noticed when I
> did my last refresh:
>    $ sudo apt-get update
>        - large list deleted for brevity sake -
>    1 not fully installed or removed.
>    Need to get 0B of archives.
>    After unpacking 0B of additional disk space will be used.
>    Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
>    perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
>    perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
>    LANGUAGE = (unset),
>    LC_ALL = (unset),
>    LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
>    are supported and installed on your system.
>    perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
>    locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or
> directory
>    locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or
> directory
>    locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
>    Setting up xfonts-scalable (1.0.0-6) ...
>    usage error: unrecognized option
>    Usage: update-fonts-dir DIRECTORY ...
>           update-fonts-dir { -h | --help }
>    This program is a wrapper for mkfontdir(1x) that is primarily useful to
> Debian
>    package maintainer scripts.  See update-fonts-dir(8) for more
> information.
>    Options:
>        -h, --help                               display this usage message
> and exitdpkg: error processing xfonts-scalable (--configure):
>    subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
>    Errors were encountered while processing:
>      xfonts-scalable
>    E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>    $
>
> I'm thinking this is weird...  I haven't done anything other than perform
> standard updates and something got hosed.  Doing some Google research, I
> find this is not uncommon of an error and that I somehow got something
> corrupt in my environment.  so I try 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales'
> and again I see the perl locale not getting set and a response of
>    locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or
> directory...
>    Generating locales...
>    en_AU.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_BW.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_CA.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_DK.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_GB.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_HK.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_IE.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_IN.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_NG.UTF-8... Cannot open locale definition file en_NG: no such file
> or
> directory. Failed.
>    en_NZ.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_PH.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_SG.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_ZA.UTF-8... up-to-date
>    en_ZW.UTF-8... up-to-date
> I am not a happy camper when I notice my Gnome screen characters are all
> open boxes now as well, there are no read-able characters - things are
> going from bad to worse.  I alt over to a TTY terminal, and am happy to
> see
> that I can still control my machine.  I am starting to sweat now...  My
> GUI
> (the Gnome WindowManager) seems to be totally hosed, unusable since I
> can't
> read anything on it.
> I look in my /etc/environment and see my LANG is set to "en" and
> everything
> seems to be in place. Just for grins, I 'export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8' and
> re-run the generate locales - same messages and still have an error in the
> en_NG...
>
> I check:
>
>    $ cat /etc/environment
>    PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11"
>    LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LANGUAGE="en"
>
>    $ locale
>    locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
>    LANG=en_US.UTF-8
>    LANGUAGE=en
>    LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
>    LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
>
> So I try to run the following in order given:
>    sudo locale-gen
>    sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
>    sudo apt-get install --reinstall language-pack-en
>
> Then, and finally... after trying 'sudo aptitude install locales' for like
> the 10th time... (ok ...  ok  - it's not ten times, and I used aptitude
> that time, not apt) I get the locales to generate and have resolved at
> least a PORTION of the problem: I no longer am getting a slew of PERL
> errors about not being able to set LC_ALL to default and the 'locale'
> command completes correctly.
>
> Wierd, it just magically worked this time and not the last previous
> times...
>
> Now, I still have the problem of xfonts-scalable (1.0.0-6) not configuring
> correctly:
>    usage error: unrecognized option
>    Usage: update-fonts-dir DIRECTORY ...
>    update-fonts-dir { -h | --help }
>    This program is a wrapper for mkfontdir(1x) that is primarily useful to
> Debian
>    package maintainer scripts. See update-fonts-dir for more information.
>    Options:
>      -h, --help display this usage message and exitdpkg: error processing
> xfonts-scalable (--configure):
>     subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
>    Errors were encountered while processing:
>    xfonts-scalable
>    E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>   Doing some more Googling...  I run
>    $ sudo apt-get install --reinstall xfonts-utils
> based on what I read in
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfonts-scalable/+bug/107687>https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...le/+bug/107687
> and it seemed to resolve the issue where xfonts-scalable was bombing out.
> I
> can now run
>    $ sudo apt-get install --reinstall language-pack-en
> successfully without errors!
>
> BUT... when I pop over to my X session and restart X, I STILL HAVE
> BOXES...
> and am still completely unusable.   How frustrating!!!  (By now, about 3
> or
> 4 hours has passed.... and I give up to get some sleep - it was after 2am
> and I had to work in the morning).  So a few more days pass - I
> periodically check the machine and my CRON jobs are doing what I want them
> to so I'm not in a rush...
>
> Then, one day I check and find the machine has crashed completely - locked
> up, unresponsive to any command, can't remote to it, nothing - can't even
> ping it.  I do the brute force reset - power switch cycle thing.  It
> boots...  there are errors...  Kernal Arguments [fail]  <--  I'm thinking,
> that's not good...  but, it continues to boot and eventually get to a
> Gnome
> boot window - unreadable, of course, with all characters displayed as open
> boxes.  Just for grins, I type in my UID and PWD and see that I am able to
> get to a regular Gnome window - but without a usable character set, any
> GUI
> is useless.
>
> I pop over to a TTY terminal and login as meself.  Then, I'm thinking,
> this
> machine is unstable.  I look in the /var/log/syslog file and don't see any
> cause for the crash - there is just a number of regular entries and then
> they just stop.  That is not promising...  I'm still thinking about the
> environment issues and the xfonts; and come to the conclusion that most
> likely this whole thing was caused by an aborted update process and
> somehow
> my environment got screwed up and in turn caused future updates to fail
> (remember the perl error messages...)
> So...  I make the fatal mistake:
>
>    $ sudo apt-get update
>    $ sudo apt-get upgrade
>
> that led to the demise of my X-server...
>
> (of course, since this is my backup machine, you would think I'd have it
> backup up right...  muahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
>    wrong...  I do have all the backups this machine is responsible for in
> a
> raid completely separated from the primary system partition (which is on a
> stand-alone PATA drive); but my CRON jobs and my mySQL database and Usenet
> automation scripts - all are not backed up.  But, I do have TTY access and
> when the machine is running I do have the ability to copy files over to
> another server.  Oh, didn't I tell you, I have more than one file server -
> this is just my oldest and smallest one - so I'm not that worried
> [Murphy's
> grinning over there in the corner]...)
>
> --Laszlo



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