Fontconfig-Error won't go away

whocares02 · 07-07-2014, 01:52 AM

Because my last threat doesn't work for some reason ("invalid post specified" when clicking on it) I post it again:

Hello,
I almost despair of bugfixing the following problem:

Code:

QIconvCodec::convertFromUnicode: using Latin-1 for conversion, iconv failed for BOM: Bad file descriptor
QIconvCodec::convertToUnicode: using Latin-1 for conversion, iconv_open failed
QIconvCodec::convertFromUnicode: using Latin-1 for conversion, iconv_open failed
Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file

It's the output of a gui-application, showing nothing but boxes instead of characters in dialogues.

I googled around and people say it's fontconfig having trouble finding /etc/fonts/fonts.conf

I checked that but the file exists and is accessible.

Other people say it's pango not finding /etc/pango/pangorc or ~/.pangorc. Again I checked both: Both files are present and accessible.

In another threat somebody claims missing fonts were the problem causing the strange message. So I installed additional fonts to satisfy some entries in xorg.conf:

Code:

xorg.conf file :
Section “Files”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript”

In my xorg.conf even more nonexistent font-paths are mentioned. I tried removing them but the entries reappear after reboot.

I installed

Code:

xfonts-tipa
xfonts-biznet-100dpi
xfonts-biznet-75dpi
xfontz-utils
xfonts-base
ghostscript-fonts

but the problem persists.

I built pango, fontconfig and freetype from source and reinstalled them - problem still present.

I reinstalled
fontconfig-config with it's dependencies: perl-base, ucf and debconfig, and installed libqtcore4_4.8.2+dfsg-11
- no change of problem.

After google can't give me anything new on the error-message (I really visited all the pages) I'm asking here now: Can please (!!!) somebody help me hunting down that error?

Edit:

Forgot mentioning that I also placed a script in /root/.kde/env/ to set two variables globally:

Code:

export FONTCONFIG_PATH=/etc/fonts
export PANGO_RC_FILE=/etc/pango/pangorc

Also, I found this threat reading

Quote:

Sounds like fontconfig got miscompiled somehow. It seems most likely that
the FONTCONFIG_PATH didn't get defined correctly.

Check your Makefile in src and ensure that you have something like:

....
sysconfdir = /etc
...
CONFDIR = ${sysconfdir}/fonts
...
INCLUDES = $(FREETYPE_CFLAGS) $(EXPAT_CFLAGS) -DFONTCONFIG_PATH='"$(CONFDIR)"' -I$(top_srcdir) -I$(top_srcdir)/src

Then run 'strings' on fccfg.o and make sure /etc/fonts is present in the
object file.

It's a quiet old post (dated 2003). In present fontconfig-source I couldn't find the mentioned lines in the /src/Makefile. Also don't know what the last line means:

Quote:

Then run 'strings' on fccfg.o and make sure /etc/fonts is present in the
object file.

bigrigdriver · 07-08-2014, 11:58 AM

In times past, occasionally an application would encounter an error condition on opening the app. The error condition could be kept in a file in the users home directory. All attempts to get the app started would fail until the error file was deleted.

I don't know if that is what is happening with pango, BUT, on examining mine, I see in the <itemData> section a reference to Error. So, pango could be keeping an error file somewhere which doesn't allow you to get past it to see if your reinstallations have done any good.

In a terminal, run locate pango.xml. If it exists it should be somewhere in your home directory. Delete it. Also delete ~/.pangorc. A new one of each will be written the next time you use pango.

The only other thing that I can think of that may contribute to the problem is the use of Latin-1, which is used for the following languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch,
English, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian,
Norwegian, Portuguese, Scottish, Spanish, and Swedish.

If the language you want to display is not one of those, you need to use a different font set.

Quote:

Also don't know what the last line means:

Quote: Then run 'strings' on fccfg.o and make sure /etc/fonts is present in the
object file.

fccfg.o is an object file (binary) which you can't read in a file viewer. The strings utility can give you a look inside the binary for strings of text.
example: in a terminal, run strings fccfg.o

whocares02 · 07-10-2014, 08:43 AM

Thank you, I'll try to find an remove the mentioned files. Yes, the language I use is one of the latin-1-languages. What if /etc/fonts isn't present in the fccfg.o-file? I will check this of course. But when it's a binary is there a way to inject the path anyway? In case of a missing entry I don't know how and where to include. I'm on a different computer right now. I'll report back as soon as I checked your suggestions.

whocares02 · 07-10-2014, 04:06 PM

The command locate doesn't exist on my system. So I ran

Code:

find / -name "pango.xml"

and

Code:

find ~ -name "pango.xml"

But got no results. I also erased ~.pangorc but it didn't change anything. The file also wasn't re-created.

In the fontconfig-source-directory I found fccfg.o in the subfolder /src/.libs/

When running

Code:

strings fccfg.o

I get a huge list of strings. So I typed

Code:

strings fccfg.o | grep /etc/fonts

The output was:

Code:

/etc/fonts

I guess it means that the string was found in the file.