Re: unable to get Gnumeric to run

[David Shochat <shochat acm org>]

Marcus Hutchinson wrote:

> Gnumeric failed to find a suitable default font
>
> Please verify your gnome-print installation  ( all I know is it's
> installed, I don't know how to test it)
>
> it goes on to say that the fontmap file (typically located in
> /usr/local/share/font/fontmap) check to see
> if it's there, and of course it is not, it's in /usr/freeware  well the
> share/ directory is but no font directory is
> and no fontmap

I got that same message at one point (see archives). What I found was 
that although I thought gnome-print was installed (and so did rpm -q), 
it wasn't completely. I think the last step of that install (whether by 
rpm or by doing a "make install" of the source tarball) is what actually 
goes out and creates the fontmap file, using something called 
gnome-font-install. Make sure it really succeeded. In my case, the 
failure was do to a bad version of zlib, which in turn caused libxml not 
to work right.

> then it asks to verify my LC_ALL and LANG environment variables  (
> what's this ???)

In the internationalization scheme used by libc and X11R6, LANG 
establishes your locale by specifying language and country (e.g. en_GB). 
In my setup, something sets it up for me to en_US. It also looks to me 
like gnome has a separate mechanism. When I choose German, for example 
in the gdm login screen, I get gnome-hint, panel menus etc. speaking 
German to me, and yet my LANG variable is still set to en_US!