Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus won't open - font problem?

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Wednesday, July 25, 2001, at 06:32  AM, Toby Russell wrote:

> I have recently installed Sun's preview release of
> Gnome 1.4 on my Ultra Sparc 5 Solaris 8 Workstation.
> Mostly it works OK, the biggest headache being
> Nautilus. It won't open. From the command line I get a
> bunch of error messages, which trimmed down look like
> this:
>
> Gdk-WARNING **: Missing charsets in FontSet creation
> Gdk-WARNING **: ISO8859-15
>
> ** ERROR **: file nautilus-gdk-font-extensions.c: line
> 957 (nautilus_gdk_font_get_fixed): assertion failed:
> (fixed_font != NULL)
> aborting..
> Abort - core dumped
>
> The 'Missing charsets' message is reapeated a number
> of times. I believe that refers to a helvetica of some
> type, anyway it exists on my system in
> /usr/openwin/lib/X11/fonts somewhere.

This message actually refers to the font "fixed", not "helvetica". Sadly, 
I am not expert on the details of the rules that Nautilus uses to locate 
fonts. Ramiro is, and he might see your message and may be able to help. 
On the other hand, the folks at Sun must have tried out this Gnome release,
 so they presumably know how to make sure that fonts are set up properly 
for it.

> Does this mean that there is a variable that Nautilus is using which 
> tells it to look in the wrong place for that font? If so, where is that 
> variable set and is it changeable?

Sorry, I'm not sure about this. Maybe other Sun Gnome 1.4 preview release 
users who are not having this problem, or Ramiro can help.

> Secondly, the file 'nautilus-gdk-font-extensions.c'
> does not exist. Is therefore the claim that line 957
> is wrong automatically sent to std_err whenever the
> default font is irretrievable? Can Nautilus work
> without that file?

That's the name and line number of a source file. The fact that you don't 
have a file by that name on your system is not a problem. The name and 
line number just helps programmers like me understand the error message 
and figure out where the bug is.

It's bad that Nautilus gives this kind of programmer level assert message 
when it can't find the "fixed" font. It should instead display a message 
that informs you what the problem is and gives you tips on what might be 
wrong and how to fix it.

> Lastly I am rather frustratingly informed that the
> list of processes including oafd, gconfd,
> nautilus-throbber and /bin/sh are still running (after
> the core dump of course) and should be killed so that
> Nautilus should not be rendered unstable (ha ha). It
> needs those processes I suppose, and whether I kill
> them or not Nautilus will not start.

This message was added by the packagers at Sun. Some of the problems with 
processes running after Nautilus exits were fixed in later versions of 
Nautilus (after Sun made their GNOME 1.4 preview release). People on other 
platforms don't see that message and are not usually bother by the 
processes that do keep running -- I'm not sure how the issues are 
different on Solaris, but for a machine where there are thousands of users,
 this additional message added by the Sun packagers may be something that 
helps you out.

    -- Darin