No Font in GTK1.x applications

May be you’re experiencing this localization bug having no font in old GTK1.x applications such as XMMS, Audacity etc. This is because of the localization settings ie. you may be selected other languages other than en_US. Type locale in a terminal to find out the localization settings. en_IN (English India) is having some bugs and because of this the GTK1.x applications not showing any fonts in their menus. To avoid this problem, you should select English (US) from the login screen and make it as the default language. en_IN and en_US are basically the same, so you may not notice any major difference. Now the XMMS menu fonts will appear. This happens because you’ve selected the country as India (or Other) during installation and the language settings goes to en_IN.

Workaround for gnome-appearance-properties using 100% CPU even after exiting

I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and whenever I change the wallpaper or theme using the Right Click -> Change Desktop background, the CPU usage goes upto 100% in the System Monitor. Even after exiting the ‘Appearance Preferences’ the process ‘gnome-appearance-properties’ persists in the memory consuming the CPU. You’ve to manually kill the process to make the CPU load to normal.

After searching the bug in launchpad, I found that the issue is not fixed yet. But there is a workaround for solving the problem. You’ve to delete the .gtkrc-2.0 configuration file in your home directory. After doing this logout and login. The issue is fixed now. The CPU load becomes normal.

rm -r ~/.gtkrc-2.0

For more information about the Bug [Visit Lauchpad]

Fix the shutdown “Network Error” display (Ubuntu)

Many Ubuntu systems have a minor bug when shutting down. Instead of displaying a splash screen indicating the progress of the shutdown process, the user is dropped out to a console screen flooded with shutdown notices (mostly network error messages). These messages are normal and expected, there is nothing to be concerned about. But it can be a bit unsightly, and it would seem that the Ubuntu team intended to have those messages hidden by the splash screen. The splash screen can be restored without much effort:

* Go to System → Administration → Login Window, and select the Local tab
* Select a different theme, then re-select the default theme (“Human”). This just refreshes the setting
* Click Close, then go back to System → Administration → Login Window, and select the Local tab again
* You’ll notice that the settings are different to what you’ve just chosen. Restore the setting to their defaults — Choose Selected only from the Theme drop-down box (instead of “Random from selected”), and re-select the default Ubuntu theme (“Human”). When complete, click Close. The setting will have saved properly this time, and the shutdown splash screen should work as intended.