32-Bit Firefox:Freaky Fonts, Frustrating Freezes [SOLVED]

erik258 · Last edited by erik258 on Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:40 pm; edited 2 times in total

Dear friends,

Firefox-bin 2.0.5 on my amd64 system is unhappy. First of all, the fonts in, for example, the open file dialog are all boxy, as if the font needs to be installed or something. The same problem exists in AcroRead, FWIW. I think some of the fonts are screwed up in other ways too, looking at this text it seems to be using a very poor font. Here's a screenshot of the font problem, just so we're clear.

Firefox also seems to enjoy crashing occasionally. I am not sure if it's flash or java causing this, but it's almost certainly one or the other.

I switched over to 32-bit firefox so I could have a 1.6 Sun JRE installed and working without crashing firefox. But it seems to merely have made matters worse...

Any Ideas?
Sincerely,
Dan Farrell
PS Please forgive me if the answer has been staring me in the face. I've searched for it a few times but It eludes me still.

Update:
This post from below should solve the problem nicely.
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Shazam · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:22 pm Post subject:

Hi there!

This could be a font problem, but it could also be an character encoding problem. what LC Variables are you using?

Type in 'locale' to see what variables are set (in case you haven't set them up)

erik258 · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:29 pm Post subject:

Shazam,

Thanks for the quick reply! I may have set them to 'POSIX' while playing around previously, or maybe not. Anyway, that's what they're set to.

Shazam · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:49 pm Post subject:

well, that's the default setting, which is more or less English. Could have thought off that, hence you live in the States ..

bad thing, can't help you any further, except for reemerging packages that have something to do with fonts.

only some more or less practical ideas:

1) with emerge -s font you should get every package available in portage which has something to do with fonts.
now i only would reemerge all packages which are installed.
o, and if you do, i would add the --oneshot option to emerge, as it only remerges the packages, but doesn't change your world file.

2) or take a look at your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and make sure, you didn't select a weird keymap.

3) does emerge -aND world want to emerge new packages? and if so, what packages? (portage tree does NOT need to be synced for this)

well, maybe this'll help you.

erik258 · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:51 pm Post subject:

I tried changing LC_ALL to 'en_US.utf8' but to no avail. I also noticed, since I was running firefox-bin from the command line, these messages:

erik258 · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:57 pm Post subject:

Shazam · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:58 pm Post subject:

mm, sounds like remerging pango could do it.

try a revdep-rebuild, this usually checks for broken libs and reemerges them.

erik258 · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 11:59 pm Post subject:

Pango, and maybe Cairo too. A good next step after the emerge completes.

Thanks again Shazam for the advice. This is starting to annoy me.
_________________
Configuring a Firewall? Try my iptables configuration
LinuxCommando.com is my blog for linux-related scraps and tidbits. Stop by for a visit!

erik258 · Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 3:09 am Post subject:

Yep, looks like that did it.

proof

Thanks again.
_________________
Configuring a Firewall? Try my iptables configuration
LinuxCommando.com is my blog for linux-related scraps and tidbits. Stop by for a visit!

Shazam · Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 6:55 am Post subject:

well, then add the [solved] to the topic. (edit the first entry you made)

erik258 · Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:38 pm Post subject:

A Better Solution to this problem, I have discovered after updating my system again and noticing that it resurfaced, is