Dialog Boxes contain x's and q"s instead of shading

mitu

@Efriim The question is - the Raspbian defaults have been working for so long without problems, so what exactly is causing this problem to appear now ?
I'm interested what causes this - is it RetroPie or Raspbian ? If you have an up-to-date RetroPie setup, but don't experience the problem, then it's most likely a Raspbian thing. Is your Raspbian system also up-to-date ?

Efriim

@mitu
I couldn't give an x or q about setups, but I do. I didn't have any problem, I was just trying to help.
When I first installed Retropie, last christmas. I remembered something like this. I know I installed US ISO-8859-1, and I dont think I changed the console but I didn't care that it looked different. I remember updating a package from source and reading some errors about either the codepage missing or I was using the wrong codepage, linux standard is use UTF-8.

mitu

@Efriim said in Dialog Boxes contain x's and q"s instead of shading:

I couldn't give an x or q about setups, but I do. I didn't have any problem, I was just trying to help.

I think you're getting this wrong.
My question if you get the same error was in order to determine what's different in your setup from the other people that reported this (including me). Please re-read my previous update and try to provide an answer if you really want to help - if you're on the last version of RetroPie but you don't get the error, then it means it's something that's changed in Raspbian. That's why I asked if you're up-to-date with your Raspbian installation, because you can update now the OS and see if you can reproduce the error.

EDIT: can you also post the contents of your /etc/default/console-setup file ?

Efriim

@mitu
I understand. I haven't upgraded raspbian packages. Will update.

ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
CHARMAP="UTF-8"
CODESET="guess"
FONTFACE=
FONTSIZE=
VIDEOMODE=
They were blank except for codeset and CHARMAP and active_consoles, I added the fontface you use. videomode was blank.

Efriim

I have one error, I think it was there before the raspbian upgrade but after a 4.4.9.

Exception OSError: (9, 'Bad file descriptor') in <module 'threading' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/threading.pyc'> ignored

The update went smoothly, there was some miscellaneous errors but I can't remember what they were now, they were in the modules.

The retropie menu looks normal
The raspi-config menu looks normal

mitu

@Efriim Thanks for the test - I'll try your config file on my installation later on to see if anything changes. Just to make sure, you're opening them from Emulationstation and not via SSH ?

Efriim

Try using the locale update in raspi config again. You can check both UTF-8 and ISO-8859 to install, try using UTF-8.

Yeah I'm using emulation stations menu. If you use SSH there is probably a way to set the codepage for both the console and the ssh client.

mitu

@Efriim Sadly, the configuration that works for you doesn't seem to work in my case - I still get the same behavior as the one reported in this topic. Mind you, I'm still using the default locale - en_GB.UTF-8.
I guess I'll have to dig a bit further.

Efriim

@mitu
I mistyped the command earlier but edited it.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
and
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
You should be able to fix it with those, ISO-8859-1 will even work, but you want to at least generate a UTF-8 as well.

If you're having the x and qs in ssh like me(I dunno how long its been that way), then I think if you switch back to ISO-8859 it will display properly, windows generally uses a ISO, alternatively you can likely change a setting in your ssh client program to use UTF-8 as per other linux defaults.

mitu

@Efriim The fonts through SSH are fine, it's just the console ones that are buggy. I don't have a keyboard on the PI, so it's a bit challenging to fiddle with the terminal settings.
However, as part of the digging process, I installed a 4.4 image and updated RetroPie only - the error doesn't show up. Next is an OS update and I'll see if anything changes after that.

mitu

An OS update makes the error reported to appear - so it's definitely something OS/Linux related that triggers this. Will have to figure out which package broke what.

brunozero

this error appears to me too, I guess it was after updating the script to 4.4.9.
But so far everything seems to work normally, this error appears when accessing the retropie setup, so I looked in the forum this seems to be related to the update of the last scrip retropie.
is there any way to reverse this? or is it just waiting for the next script update?

mitu

@brunozero It's doesn't seem to be a RetroPie problem, but one from Raspbian. Did you read the rest of the topic ?

brunozero

@mitu said in Dialog Boxes contain x's and q"s instead of shading:

Raspbian

I'm sorry I'm noob, just a regular user who noticed the error, has this error been with the hardware? is there any solution for him or his cause?

mitu

@brunozero You can use @Efriim's solution to reconfiure your language/locale and choose an ISO-8859-1 locale.

mitu

OK, found the culprit - it's the raspi-config update from Jan 2019 that changes the auto-login service (https://github.com/RPi-Distro/raspi-config/commit/d33487cbeac581d2ce91d8372f5feb1e2b5b7e3a).
TL;DR version - when configuring the auto-login (via raspi-config), the $TERM variable is replaced with the value from the current running session and added to the auto-login config file, instead of being added literally as $TERM in the auto-login configuration file.

So, if I ran raspi-config from a SSH session, my $TERM is xterm-256color - this gets added to the auto-login session, but the Linux terminal doesn't have the same capabilities (should be $TERM=linux).
This does not happen if you run raspi-config from the console, via the keyboard.

hhromic

@mitu that's a great debugging job, very good catch. I can confirm indeed this is happening. In my case $TERM got expanded to linux so I never noticed. Indeed this is a bug and good to see you already posted an issue on the Foundation's GitHub. Very well done.

brunozero

@mitu thanks for solving, but how do I apply the correction? I opened the link and got a lot of lines of code :(, unfortunately I do not know how to do this

Aqualime

I installed a clean 4.4 image and performed a full update. Obviously the same issue as above. I just wanted to make sure the error we are getting is related to the messy text in the setup menu. I'm not sure I understood.

Exception OSError: (9, 'Bad file descriptor') in <module 'threading' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/threading.pyc'> ignored

mitu

@brunozero You'll have to edit the /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/autologin.conf file and replace - on the 3nd line:

ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin pi --noclear %I xterm-256color

with

ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin pi --noclear %I $TERM

then reboot.