Characters missing in X

Zeerak · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:56 pm Post subject: Characters missing in X

Hey, I recently had some help with getting my terminals to show danish characters (æ,ø,å) and it's still working (which is part of what boggles me).
Well onto what's actually wrong. Yesterday I noticed that I couldn't compile a working latex document with these letters. So I started looking a bit more at it, and it turns out that rxvt-unicode doesn't show the letters correctly (as an example "ø" is replaced by "Ã,") and I can't type them in it either. They simply do not register. Furthermore I can type them in xterm, which in turn also doesn't show the name of the file/folder correctly if I have created the file in one of the virtual terminals. Which in turn of course can't show the name correctly if I name them in xterm.

I would have suspected that the error came from updating xorg-server, but it also appears in mutt and emacs. Both are specified to run with utf-8 (as the rest of my system is) in the configuration files. Mutt is run from a terminal, and the things it can't display are apostraphes and "ø", which the terminal is displaying fine outside of mutt.
I'm not quite sure what the cause of this error is. But here's a list of the emerges since I last remember it working.

Zeerak · Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 7:50 pm Post subject:

An update. Latex now works. Emacs as well... Although it registers the missing characters as dead keys, but I'm not going to nitpick.

Only mutt and the terminals are left.
_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Is it possible that it's the type of font used?

The oslash et al works fine here in urxvt + mutt here using media-fonts/dejavu.

Zeerak · Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 2:47 pm Post subject:

Could be, I'll try switching to dejavu and see what gives :-)

_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Zeerak · Posted: Sat Mar 27, 2010 11:22 pm Post subject:

Mutt isn't in urxvt, but I tried running urxvt with -fn xft:dejavu but I still can't write (or read) the letters.

Edit:

I may have spoken too soon, urxvt is showing the letters properly now. For some reason. :-)

Edit No. 2:

Again may have spoken too soon again. Further investigation is needed :-)

Be back in a few minutes. :-)

It's almost as if it's not in utf-8 when I start it from the menu but is in utf-8 if I start it from terminal. (All of my locales are set to utf-8 so I'm a bit baffled, furthermore when I start xterm with the -u8 option it reads all characters)

Strange strange strange...
_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Ok then, please post the output of:

Zeerak · Posted: Sun Mar 28, 2010 3:12 pm Post subject:

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

I am uncertain why there are those strange backslashes in your emerge --info.

Zeerak · Posted: Sun Mar 28, 2010 10:59 pm Post subject:

Here's a new pastebin: http://pastebin.com/0hDepp7h

I'm not sure what backslashes you're referring to entirely.

but the commands you asked run:

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

That second emerge --info looks correct.

In your first pastebin don't you see weird backslashes in the USE section, etc... but it shouldn't really matter since the backslash at the end of the line should escape the newline character.

Zeerak · Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2010 3:34 pm Post subject:

I think the backslashes might be something from an editor or such.

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

This bug 308699 reports dev-libs/icu-4.4 is now fixed in portage without a version bump.

Today after syncing portage and unmasking dev-libs/icu-4.4, everything has built correctly.
Don't know if this fixes your unicode issues though.

Zeerak · Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 11:10 pm Post subject:

well it pretty much nailed them (I also did a fresh install as I had some file system corruption YAY! And it seemed to be about time)
One thing still though. Urxvt only shows æ,ø,å (and acknowledges that the buttons are entered) when invoked from another terminal and xterm shows them fine but seems to have a mapping as if it were dead keys, unless invoked from another terminal, in which case they don't respond as dead keys but as regular keys.

Any ideas?
_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

It looks like backslashes are being inserted randomly, probably caused by something in the way the keymapping is configured.
How is your keymapping configured anyway?
How are you switching modes?

And how does your eselect fontconfig list look?

I have everything enabled except these:

Zeerak · Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2010 2:37 pm Post subject:

I'm not sure I am switching modes in X.

Another interesting thing is that if I run the startup script from a terminal urxvt shows and writes the letters fine, but when it is started up through the login I can't see or write the letters.

The keymaps are configured as such:

conf.d/keymaps:

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

I would definitely enable all the dejavu stuff and 70-yes-bitmaps.conf in fontconfig.

I only do this in X with xmodmap, which requires some configuring and manual mode switching.

It does stuff like this aàäâåæ AÀÄÂÅÆ oöôø OÖÔØ and so on...

Maybe try x11-base/xorg-x11 which emerges many more fonts, and also throw in media-fonts/font-misc-misc for good measure (if you don't have it).

Zeerak · Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2010 5:03 pm Post subject:

I've found another clue :-)

I usually start X by typing slim rather than startx, if I however type startx (as $USER) then it all works as it should. Should I however enter slim (only root can do this) then I experience the errors.
(I haven't emerged anything, I've simply enabled what you suggested in fontconfig).

There doesn't seem to be anything in slim.conf that could explain it.
_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

I don't know slim, mostly KDM. But AFAIK login managers generally aren't concerned with such things as auto-starting apps, or auto-enabling settings.

Perhaps ~/.Xclients - if you are using some sort of Xclient for this:

Zeerak · Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2010 6:49 pm Post subject:

None that I can see.

Could it be that it is slim is invoked by root?
_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

I don't know slim.
If it's started from xdm then it would normally be owned by user "root".

Zeerak · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 12:19 am Post subject:

I believe it is. I think one can have xdm give the ownership to $user. I'll have a look at it and return :-)

Unless you happen to know the command(s) to do it :-)

_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Nope, don't know how to do that one.

Maybe try a different login manager first to see if it works the way you want that way.

Another thing might be to append exec startx to the bottom of your $HOME/.bashrc file.
That way when you login as $USER your xsession will be started and the shell exited for you automatically.

Zeerak · Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 10:47 pm Post subject:

Okay back with some news.

I tried adding "exec startx" to my $HOME/.bashrc and that worked, I'm just being picky and want to be able to use the terminal where I run it from (as most of my work is done in terminal.
I also tried gdm, and gdm works fine, so at the moment I'm looking for another login manager that doesn't depend on xdm. And is lightweight :-)

_________________
Einstein was a great man, but he got one thing wrong with his theory of relativity. E= MC hammer. As far as logic goes, this is flawed, but as a show of wit, you can't touch this

Mike Hunt · Watchman Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 5287

Well that's good, at least you have a few reasonable, workable options.
It's a very good starting point.