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

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.

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.