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wh7qq - 06.10.2006, 19:19 Uhr
Titel: Firefox 1.5.07 problems following du

When I pass the mouse cursor over some areas in pages in Firefox, the text or other features may dissappear. Never saw it in 1.5.06 and earlier. Is there an easy way to revert to the last version? I just did a big du on 2006 Easter...several weeks overdue since I was waiting for an OOo fix.

Paul

mzilikazi - 06.10.2006, 20:22 Uhr
Titel: RE: Firefox 1.5.07 problems following du

You might try simply moving the .mozilla dir out of the way (not deleting) and then start firefox. You will need to reinstall all of your themes/extensions tho. As user:

Code:

$ mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.old

Now try firefox.
You can put the ~/.mozilla dir back in place and not have to reinstall your themes/extensions but presumably that would also recreate the problem.

Another option would be to try ff in experimental.
If you have an experimental repo:

Code:

# apt-get install firefox/experimental

Need an experimental repo?

Code:

# echo "deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

# apt-get update

# apt-get install firefox/experimental

h2 - 06.10.2006, 21:13 Uhr
Titel: RE: Firefox 1.5.07 problems following du

Sounds like the dreaded kde configuration file error, very easy to fix:

go to kde control center
select appearances
select fonts
uncheck the box that says use antialiasing
click apply
check the box that says use antialiasing
click apply
close kde, restart kde, and this issue should be gone.

Do not remove or change your .mozilla directory, it's not the problem unless there is some brand new issue, which I haven't heard of yet.

wh7qq - 07.10.2006, 07:39 Uhr
Titel: RE: Firefox 1.5.07 problems following du

Aarrghhh! I must have really screwed up the simple sequence h2 described. Now all my desktop text is big, black and fuzzy and there is no text in the Kmenus. Went back and tried it again...no joy. Even did a fresh du-fixes-h2.sh to no avail. Sending this from the live CD. Help!

John - 07.10.2006, 08:24 Uhr
Titel: RE: Firefox 1.5.07 problems following du

you can add a new user

su
chroot /media/your installation

adduser newuser

you got to add this user to all the groups your original user was in
adduser newuser audio...

you got to copy all your files to the new /home/newuser. don't do it with all .kde stuff or you'll get the same problem again

piper - 07.10.2006, 17:49 Uhr
Titel: RE: Firefox 1.5.07 problems following du

What I did to fix this problem on another machine was

apt-get remove --purge firefox
remove the mozilla folder in /home
reboot
apt-get update
apt-get install firefox

That fixed it for me, your results might be different !

wh7qq - 07.10.2006, 23:43 Uhr
Titel:

So I went ahead and opened up a new user and tried toggling antialiasing again per h2...same result. Furry black text under all the desktop icons and no text in the kmenu titles. The page rendering problem crosses over to konqueror so it's not a firefox issue. So if anyone is having the same problem, do not toggle the antialiasing. It makes it worse.

Is this something new associated with a fresh dist-upgrade like the console error thing?

will try piper's approach next.

Paul

wh7qq - 08.10.2006, 00:03 Uhr
Titel:

Still wierd after apt-get remove --purge firefox, apt-get update, removing .mozilla and apt-get install firefox. The Kanotix pages reder partially...text on some lines and not others in a random fashion. Crazy! I'm about to try RC4...this is a mess.

Paul

jiro - 09.10.2006, 03:59 Uhr
Titel:

yes, i have the same problems for the last week or two. see this thread:

http://kanotix.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&p=134745#134745

none of the fixes suggested have worked for me. most of the text is in invisible fonts, in firefox, konqueror, kde menus, kdm, yakuake, and whatever else i can think of. i am guessing it is a problem with xorg or kde, but i really don't know...

i've stopped using kanotix for the time being. i will wait for 2006-01 to be released and then do a complete reinstall. can't understand why not more people have reported anything like this - i guess we're "special"

drb - 09.10.2006, 08:47 Uhr
Titel:

The only disappearing menu I have had was openoffice calc. I uninstalled openoffice.org-gtk and it solved the problem.

drb

jiro - 09.10.2006, 16:13 Uhr
Titel:

well, i just did a dist-upgrade using h2's script on a different box which had worked flawlessly until now, and that system is borked too in exactly the same way, i.e., disappearing fonts throughout kdm, kde, konqueror, firefox, etc.

so both my boxes are now borked - and they have very different hardware (one is a four-year old Acer laptop with a P-4M processor and on-board wireless, the other is a one-year old Dell desktop with a regular P4 processor and D-Link wireless card).

(please don't tell me it was stupid to d-u the second computer after screwing up the first one - i figured this out by myself...)

piper - 09.10.2006, 17:59 Uhr
Titel:

jiro

I don't think it was stupid at all, every machine is different, even identical machines behave differently, I would have done the same thing, you don't know till you try, sorry you and a few others are having problems Traurig

wh7qq - 09.10.2006, 20:24 Uhr
Titel:

I may have found a workaround to this little nasty: go back to the "nv" video driver. Go to Kcontrol, Kanotix, Display, Drivers and change" nvidia" to "nv". Now this page renders just fine where it was very spotty before. I got this idea from googling on "kde dissappearing fonts" and found a reference from one of the Mandrivel forums that pointed me that way...they have the problem too. Too early to be sure but it looks like a solution for now. Will update here if I have any more problems with it.

Thinking about this some more...when I did du-fixes-h2.sh, I did not upgrade the nvidia video driver. Could that be the problem?

Swynndla - 09.10.2006, 21:16 Uhr
Titel:

jiro, I think it's normal for dist-upgrade to break in sid from time to time, no matter how you do it. That's why a lot of the more experienced people here have gone to lengths to minimise the risk and frustration ... eg doing it on a test machine first just to check, or being able to do a complete restore with rdiff-backup, or only doing upgrades instead of dist-upgrades.

What I'm saying is there are times where you can't do anything about it until the fixed packages come into the repos. Sometimes you can uninstall packages and install "testing" packages instead and that will get you up and running until the the fixed packages are in the repos. But sometimes no-one has a fix other than to wait or to "upgrade-install" from a live kanotix cd.

I can understand when you say

Zitat:

i've stopped using kanotix for the time being

as this can be very frustrating. I personally use rdiff-backup and I can boot up a live kanotix cd and restore my root partition to exactly the way it was before a dist-upgrade (and it'll only take about 15 or 20 mins). But even so, dist-upgrades break things so much that I don't do it any more on my main pc, and I only use "apt-get upgrade" instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade". I do still do dist-upgrades on my other pc's.

jiro, I don't think anyone thinks you're stupid at all. All I'm saying is that when you are told by more experienced kanotix users that it's a good idea to dist-upgrade everyday, the people that are saying this will either have a backout plan (like the ability to do full restores, or they do it on a test pc first) or they like the challenge. For an inexperienced user with only one pc (I'm not saying that you are inexperienced), who wants to stay up to date but doesn't want to spend lots of admin time fixing their pc, maybe dist-upgrades aren't a good idea.

Now h2's du script has done wonders to make dist-upgrades safer, as he hangs out in #kanotix on IRC for you, and keeps up with the play, and put various fixes in his script, and he'll also put up the latest warnings so you can read them and then decide whether or not to dist upgrade today.

But the script wont be able to protect the user from everything (especially if some problems only happen on certain installs), and users have found that they still run into problems. To be fair, h2 often has the warnings in his script, but users dist-upgrade anyway. But sometimes problems come out of the blue. Now note that if this happens to h2, then if it turns out to be something that he can't fix (and if the guru's on #kanotix can't fix it) then he's always got the option of doing a full root restore, as he uses rdiff-backup.

Therefore, I would personally recommend the following:
1) new user decides to install kanotix
2) new user only does "apt-get upgrade" instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade" while learning the in's and out's of kanotix.
3) user then sets up rdiff-backup.
4) user now decides whether to do dist-upgrades or just upgrades.

Now I would go as far as saying rdiff-backup is the best thing I've seen in linux. Look for h2's rdiff-backup script in the bottom of h2's and piper's sig's.

This is an rdiff-backup howto:
http://kanotix.com/FAQ-id_cat-70.html
but h2's script makes it much more user friendly.

wh7qq - 09.10.2006, 21:27 Uhr
Titel: Causes and Fix...looks good so far!

Ok, I went back and did ./du-fixes-h2.sh again and at the end I did a reinstall of the nvidia driver. Everything seems to be working fine now, even through a reboot.

I think perhaps it is not a good idea to do dist-upgrade without doing a reinstall of the video driver (as I did, leading to this problem).

Paul

Swynndla - 09.10.2006, 21:38 Uhr
Titel: RE: Causes and Fix...looks good so far!

wh7qq ... oh every time you dist-upgrade and it does anything at all with X then you should reinstall the 3d video drivers (if you use them, in your case the nvidia driver).

jiro - 10.10.2006, 01:58 Uhr
Titel:

Swynndla,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I'm not upset with anyone and no one (except myself) has said I was stupid to break my second box after breaking the first one.

I didn't stop using Kanotix out of anger or frustration - it's simply unusable without visible text Winken

I did not mean to imply h2's script was somehow to blame - my first box broke when i manually did an "apt-get upgrade". I tried using h2's script b/c i thought maybe that would be better than what i did myself. wasn't better, but also wasn't worse. (actually - this was the first time i tried h2's script and it seems like an amazing piece of script - my box got borked from the d-u, not from the script! i will continue to use h2's script once i get up and running)

And yes, breakage using Sid is to be expected once in a while. the strange thing is that almost no one is reporting this problem.

anyway i'll try wh7qq's suggestion of reinstalling the nvidia driver - i believe i already tried that a few times, but i don't think i tried reverting to the nv driver first

if that works, i'll be quite happy...

h2 - 10.10.2006, 03:58 Uhr
Titel:

Since two boxes that are totally different experience the same issue, it's unlikely that it's the actual dist-upgrade.

My guess is this:

1. bad cd burn of iso. Or bad/weak cd burner. Or bad cheap cd blanks. Not burned dao, burned too fast.

If none of these for absolutely certain:

2. failure to run at least one critical fix by doing a du without using my script. My script will not fix issues after they have happened in most cases, but it will fix them at the time of doing the dist-upgrade if the fix is known.

If it's not this, you're more in land of bad luck, cursed machines, evil spirits, and then you definitely want to start using a solid backup system so you can easily recover.

Swyndla is absolutely right when he talks about how many testers etc do this, multiple installs. I have 3 kanotix installs 32 bit on this box, 1 64 bit, plus usually at least 2 or 3 more on other machines I have lying around or that I'm fixing for friends. And I do full backups routinely. And I use those backups to recover from failures, although I very rarely need to do that, maybe 1 time ever few months.

Despite how solid and stable kanotix is, anything running off of debian sid is going to be unstable at some point because sid is unstable by definition, that's what sid is, debian unstable.

But most cases I've seen where someone consistently had failures it almost always comes down to some non kanotix factor, whether it's hardware, cdrom burn, user error, or whatever else it might be. The trick is to find what it might be. First to suspect is always an aging cd burner, with cheap disks as second, and if both are together, then you might as well just throw the installation away.

jiro - 10.10.2006, 05:17 Uhr
Titel:

OK: i tried wh7qq's work-around, using the nv video driver instead of the nvidia driver - and this fixes the disappearing font problem on BOTH boxes (but of course now i get no 3-D performance)

but when i try re-installing the nvidia driver on either box, using either h2's script or "install-nvidia-debian.sh" - the disappearing font problem returns.

whatever my problem is, i'm pretty sure it's not a CD-burn problem: both machines have been running kanotix flawlessly for months (from hard drive, not LiveCD).

it's also not a kernel problem: my boxes run different kernels (2.6.18-slh-up-2 and 2.6.15.6)

might be something related to how i set up my systems. but i don't think i do anything too strangel. i do delete german- and french-specific packages (keyboard layouts, for example) but i don't think this would explain the situation.

ah well... i guess i'll just hang until 2006-01 comes out...

Swynndla - 10.10.2006, 05:43 Uhr
Titel:

Some questions:

How do you delete the german and french packages?

Also, have you changed the fonts in Control Center > Appearance & Themes > Fonts? ... if you have then maybe that's what did it. If you haven't then maybe you should Winken

Did you install the naughty "gtk2-engines-gtk-qt" package?

Have you installed the msttcorefonts?

Have you done anything else here?:
http://kanotix.com/index.php?name=PNphp ... p;start=15

h2 - 10.10.2006, 05:46 Uhr
Titel:

gtk2-engines-gtk-qt, right, I will be very happy when that package is permanently removed and banned from sid and debian. It's errors and problems are so utterly random that using it is like playing russion roulette with every computer you have it installed on.

Unfortunately, the simple fact of running kanotix fine until something breaks is not an adequate guarantee that the cd rom or burner is bad.

The lasers in cd burners can and do fade long before they die, and they can be, and are, made cheaply, with poor mechanics. I never buy brands I don't know from testing them or quality reviews, both cdroms and cd burners.

jiro - 10.10.2006, 17:59 Uhr
Titel:

i deleted the german and french packages using kpackage, deleting the -de- and -fr- packages.

i have gtk2-engines but not gtk2-engines-gtk-qt

i installed the ms core fonts

i tweaked desktop appearance for multiple users on both boxes. i did so both before and after the current problems with no effect

both systems were installed from the easter-rc4 cd. i downgraded the kernel on my laptop to 2.6.15.6 due to wireless incompatibility and upgraded the kernel on the desktop a few times. since installling i regularly did d-u and installed a few other programs (freemind, a few games, etc)

jiro - 11.10.2006, 06:36 Uhr
Titel: FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!

FIXED (finally):

solved my "disappearing fonts" problem by installing the latest (v.8774) nvidia driver FROM THE NVIDIA.COM WEBSITE not thru h2's script or my usual method (install-nvidia-debian.sh).

more info: my laptop's graphic card (GeForce 2) is identified as a "legacy" device which is supported only by nvidia's legacy driver, v.7174. but when i installed that "legacy" driver using nvidia's installer i got the same display problems as when i used the above methods (leading me to guess that maybe these other methods are not finding v.8774). ONLY when i used the latest driver, v.8774, which supposedly does not support my "legacy" card, did the display problems get fixed.

EDIT:

can now confirm that this fix also works on my desktop running 2.6.18-slh-up2 kernel. i removed, then reinstalled the latest stable kernel, dist-upgraded everything, did various cleanup tasks - all using h2's script.

THEN i did not use either h2's nor kano's script to install the nvidia graphics driver. INSTEAD i downloaded the installer on the nvidia.com website. worked like a charm.

THUS: there is apparently a bug in whatever deb package contains the nvidia driver (so both h2's and kano's excellent scripts downloaded what turned out to be a buggy deb package)

wh7qq - 11.10.2006, 19:41 Uhr
Titel: RE: FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!

Questions for h2 (or whoever): Is running testcd from the live disk sufficient to insure it's integrity? After your post I got paranoid and rechecked my Easter CD. I always check the download md5 but had trusted my HP burner running at 8x to do the job. It did according to testcd. If you walk away while testcd is running and you come back to a fully running system, would testcd have stopped the load if it hadn't passed? It's a pain sitting though all that dead time while it checks. My ADD/HD again Winken

h2 - 11.10.2006, 19:58 Uhr
Titel: RE: FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!

Personally, no, I don't think it's enough, no. The weirdnesses with bad burns can be just that, weird. That was my first experience with kanotix, a bad burn, and no, testcd did not catch it.

Keep in mind, every time a cd burner is used to burn a cd, it becomes slightly less 'trustworthy', by some small percentage. So if it's very old, I don't trust it. The laser wears out over time, that is.

Considering you can buy something like this liteon 52x burner for about $US 25
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=170655
or its dvd burning cousin for about $8 more, there really is very little reason to keep any old burner.

Simple test I'd say is if it's slower than maybe 16x it's too old to be trusted any more, unless it was used very little over the years. Laptop burners, being radically less robust than full sized cd burners, are to be trusted even less. The more cds that were burned, the less you can trust it.

And crappy no name or cheap cd media is never to be trusted, especially as it ages. The chemical dyes in it break down much faster than good quality media. When you burn a cd, you aren't actually 'burning' it, you are zapping a small point with a laser beam, which triggers the heat sensitive dye and creates a small spot. That's why burned cds if left in the sunlight fail. Real cds are actually burned, a layer of some metal like substance is burned with a high power laser to create a little dimple, which is why commercial cds are much more durable than burned cds.

And good quality media is actually very tricky to locate, the only brand I know of that you can actually trust to not outsource its manufactoring is Taiyo Yuden, which is a very high end, but very reasonably priced, manufacturor of cd and dvd blanks, from Japan. That's all I use.
http://supermediastore.com/taiyo-yuden- ... media.html
that's a great store to get them by the way, you'll never find that brand at a normal computer store, although sometimes tdk or other companies actually use taiyo yuden stuff, but sometimes they don't, you can't ever tell for sure.

Memorex is by the way especially untrustworthy, and have been for years, since they were in the cassette tape business. Brands I'd tend to trust more than others: yamaha, tdk, verbatim. But I never buy them if I can help it.

<hint>I've done this for years, every time I set up a box for a friend, I give them my old burner, which is rarely more than 1 year old, and I get a new one, as part of the price of me doing that work for them for free.

mzilikazi - 11.10.2006, 22:18 Uhr
Titel: Re: RE: FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!

wh7qq hat folgendes geschrieben::

It's a pain sitting though all that dead time while it checks. My ADD/HD again Winken

CTRL+ALT+F1

Swynndla - 12.10.2006, 04:56 Uhr
Titel: Re: RE: FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!

h2 hat folgendes geschrieben::

Considering you can buy something like this liteon 52x burner for about $US 25
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=170655
or its dvd burning cousin for about $8 more, there really is very little reason to keep any old burner.

... except if you don't live in the US, when the large postage price and then exchange rate into the local currency could lead to an unfavourable price! Smilie

h2 - 12.10.2006, 06:48 Uhr
Titel: RE: Re: RE: FIXED!!!!!!!!!!!

Just posted as an example, of course best to buy locally in most cases. That's a global brand, so shouldn't be hard to find it.