[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
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
-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@luci.org with
"unsubscribe luci-discuss" in the body.