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

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.

mitu

@Aqualime For the 2nd error you reported, there is a fix pending, when it will be accepted to the RetroPie-Setup repository you'll only have to update the script.

brunozero

@mitu Thanks a lot, I already turned off the rpb but before turning off I updated the script and apparently the error problem stopped, but tomorrow I confirm, if I still continue I run your solution, thank you very much

Lolonois

FWIW the Issue is pending in raspi-config

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/raspi-config/issues/88

mitu

Well, the issue got fixed in the raspi-config repository, so the next raspi-config release should make the problem go away.