Gnome problem

[R'as al Ghul]

Hello,

i've OpenSuse 10.2 as a dual boot system with WinXP. I haven't done anything on it in the last 4-6 months.
Yesterday I booted it up and every text bit is unreadable. I can only see rectangles where text should be. The last time I worked on the system I increased the desktop resolution to 1280*1024. Then the fonts where unreadably small. I imported ttf fonts from Windows and had all but a few parts in readable fonts. Somehow the fonts seem to be broken.
How can I change the fonts now?
Even if I find the way to the right control panel in the GUI I wouldn't be able to do anything because I can't read what I do.
Changing to runlevel 1 (that's the shell mode, right?) works and I can use the shell. Alas, I've never edited a file from the shell using vi. And I don't know which file in Gnome determines the used fonts. Switching the font back to default is all I want.
Any ideas?

Disclaimer: This is not my working system. No panic, no urgency. I'm just curious.

[Caius]

Hello,

i've OpenSuse 10.2 as a dual boot system with WinXP. I haven't done anything on it in the last 4-6 months.
Yesterday I booted it up and every text bit is unreadable. I can only see rectangles where text should be. The last time I worked on the system I increased the desktop resolution to 1280*1024. Then the fonts where unreadably small. I imported ttf fonts from Windows and had all but a few parts in readable fonts. Somehow the fonts seem to be broken.
How can I change the fonts now?
Even if I find the way to the right control panel in the GUI I wouldn't be able to do anything because I can't read what I do.
Changing to runlevel 1 (that's the shell mode, right?) works and I can use the shell. Alas, I've never edited a file from the shell using vi. And I don't know which file in Gnome determines the used fonts. Switching the font back to default is all I want.
Any ideas?

Disclaimer: This is not my working system. No panic, no urgency. I'm just curious.

Why don't you run an Scandisk and Chkdsk diagnostic to see if those programs fix you the problem?

I'm not sure if its the best idea out there, but I am trying to help.

[caravel]

@Caius: OpenSuse is a Linux distro. fsck is the equivalent for Linux systems.

@R'as: This should be an easy one to fix, I'm at work now so I'll look into it when I get home. The small unreadable fonts could have been increased in size, I'm not sure why you had to convert windows fonts? What program did you use to convert the fonts?

runlevel 1 is single user mode, even in a terminal without the X server you should be in run level3. You can do CTRL+ALT+F1 - F6 to access the terminals even while the X server is running. CTRL+ALT+F7 will take you back to the X server again. CTRL+ALT+BKSP will kill the X server, and doing "gdm" should return you to gnome.

[Caius]

I didnt know that caravel. Well, I've learnt something new. Is the idea good? Or it could bring us some problems with other programs?

[R'as al Ghul]

@R'as: This should be an easy one to fix, I'm at work now so I'll look into it when I get home. The small unreadable fonts could have been increased in size, I'm not sure why you had to convert windows fonts? What program did you use to convert the fonts?

Thx for taking the time. After increasing the resolution I tried to adjust the font size. the result wasn't to my taste, I don't remember the details. I then read that you could use the ttf fonts from windows. I did not need to convert them I just copied them over I guess. I did work in any case without much hassle.

I do get the error that windows/c/ can't be mounted. I suspect that if I only link to the fonts on the windows disk and don't mount the disk at startup, it could lead to "no font" being displayed. Just a theory.

runlevel 1 is single user mode, even in a terminal without the X server you should be in run level3. You can do CTRL+ALT+F1 - F6 to access the terminals even while the X server is running. CTRL+ALT+F7 will take you back to the X server again. CTRL+ALT+BKSP will kill the X server, and doing "gdm" should return you to gnome.

Ah, okay. RL 3, it is. Thanks again. I'm just an ambitious linux amateur.

@ Caius: Thx for trying mate. linux works a bit different. You usually don't need extra tool programs. You can edit most of the configuration files easily because they're all text files.

[Caius]

@ Caius: Thx for trying mate. linux works a bit different. You usually don't need extra tool programs. You can edit most of the configuration files easily because they're all text files.

Heh, that happens when you still all your pc life to Doors, err, Windows.

[caravel]

Well, gnome uses xml config files and not regular text config files, so I'm having to look into this one.

The one thing you might want to try is creating a new user account and then logging in as that user. The new account should go back to the default fonts. You could then work on copying over some of the new users gnome config files to the old user's in order to put them back to the defaults. The per user gnome xml config files seem to be located in: ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome

I'll have a look and see if there's any other way to edit the files.

To add a new user from the terminal do:

sudo adduser newrasalghul

If all that fails try this:

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /desktop/gnome/font_rendering

Note: You may need to be root. I haven't tried this myself, I found it googling.