Google used to help me out greatly, but lately it's been a little flaky and I don't know why ...

I'll snip out the back story, for which I am [in]famous, due to its length.

I'm running WindowMaker version 0.92.0 on what I will call Debian Unstable/Meltingpot (since I pull packages from whichever apt repository apt-get.org says has them) . I recently have lost my WindowMaker menus. They're blank. I right-click on the screen and the "Applications" menu shows up -- all menu items are there, they just have no lettering to say what they are. They're blank. e.g., I can click the block in the menu and the program will load, but I don't have anything other than my own memory to tell me what the program even is, until it opens. It's almost like the fonts are missing, but then I would expect squares instead of blankness, and the menus and fonts work fine in other window managers as well as other applications. It's limited to WindowMaker.


I have been running apt-get upgrade a bit lately. Sometimes it breaks things, but usually they fix themselves after a few more apt-get upgrades, or are easy to fix to begin with. Well, this one's eluding me. Two hits I've found on Google (maybe "menus blank in windowmaker" is a bad search set) describe the problem I'm having, but as usual, the fix suggested (which generally dates from sometime around the turn of the millenium) didn't work for me and what seems at times must be the most unique setup on the planet.

Any ideas?

I'll provide any information I can to help find a solution. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to start exploring other window managers.

Many thanks in advance

CJ Chitwood

in a terminal type "update-menus" and see if that does the trick. Also I would create my own menu for use, that cant be directly affected by the windowmaker menus.

Thanks for the suggestion. I had tried that before, but had forgotten about it, but alas it did not work.

I do have a customish menu. I had set up the menu through the WPrefs app. Will that be sufficiently removed from stock WindowMaker?

FWIW, it's almost as though the font were missing. I would in that case expect to find squares in place of the letters, but I don't really know. Still, WindowMaker is the only program -- and indeed, only its menus -- which seem to be having any problem.

Hmmm...

I was about to post my menu, but it occurs to me I haven't checked the /etc/X11/WindowMaker/wmmacros file yet... and I see some configs in there, but nothing for fonts. I do see styles and such, though... could these have anything to do with it?

Thanks again...

CJ

Okay, here's what I found...

I was going through anything I could, including WPrefs.app. Going through it, I came eventually to "Smooth Font Edges". Well, at least it gave me back my menu font, but inside WPrefs, some of the fonts in there are still blank. Not sure what to do there... I guess I'll wait until I've sufficiently hosed WMaker that it needs a reinstall and maybe then it will work.

Thanks, though.

I always tell my wife, "now i have my system just the way I want it!" then about 5 days later I end up doing a reinstall because I've completely mangled it damn I love Linux!