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

[Laszlo Acs <laszlo@lanscape.net>]

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/+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