For me the symptoms were first observed with PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT. The first of my 2016 screenshots (below) is similar to the 2012 shot in Debian-related Fonts of some applications get confused so, reading the two questions alongside each other:
- it seems that the problem/symptoms may affect multiple desktop environments in both Linux and FreeBSD.
From my screenshots:
- please, can anyone guess what's wrong?
Hint: to clearly view the symptoms, you may find it necessary to view each shot full-size.
In my case it's certain that symptoms are present for multiple users and multiple desktop environments – and most (maybe all) packages have been reinstalled. So:
- I guess that the problem is with a configuration file that is shared (not in any home directory).
I tested a new user account, the problem persisted.
Screenshots
Document Viewer (Evince)
Poorly rendered fonts in the toolbar and sidebar of the application:
Xterm
Poorly rendered font within the terminal window:
Luxi Sans medium and Terminal in xfontsel
The poorly rendered font sample in the lowest part of the application window (although from commentary below, and from glancing at xfontsel on a different computer, it may be that the pixellation is to be expected in this application):
Xfburn
Comparisons
The shot of Xfburn may be most telling; the degraded appearance is not limited to fonts. Compare what's above with a 2010 shot (from Xfburn – A tool the size of the task | Written and Read):
When I choose a PC-BSD 10.2-RELEASE boot environment on the affected machine, there's no problem. In this shot from 10.2, (GNOME) System Monitor appears fine:
Additional notes
When I logged in to MATE, the fonts in its menu bar were pixellated.
Without running X, I ran the following command to force reinstallation (or upgrade) of all packages –
pkg upgrade -f
– then restarted the operating system. That pkg routine did not work around the problem.
As far as I can tell, the poor font rendering is no better when VESA mode applies.
Shortlist of some affected applications
- Files (nautilus) 3.18.5
- Gnote 3.18.1
- HexChat 2.10.2
- Pidgin 2.10.12 (libpurple 2.10.12)
- System Monitor (gnome-system-monitor) 3.16.0
- Web (epiphany) 3.16.3
- Xfburn 0.5.4
- XTerm 322
Shortlist of some non-affected applications
At a glance:
- Firefox 44.0.2
- Konsole 2.14.2
- Konversation 1.5.1
- KSnapshot 0.8.2
- System Log (KSystemLog) 0.4
- Thunderbird 38.6.0
GTK
Neither /usr/local/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc nor /usr/local/etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini exists –
$ cat /usr/local/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
cat: /usr/local/etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc: No such file or directory
$ ls -al /usr/local/etc/gtk-2.0/
total 9
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 3 8 Feb 20:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 67 root wheel 154 21 Feb 22:25 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 890 5 Feb 13:52 im-multipress.conf
$ cat /usr/local/etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
cat: /usr/local/etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini: No such file or directory
$ ls -al /usr/local/etc/gtk-3.0/
total 9
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 3 21 Feb 22:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 67 root wheel 154 21 Feb 22:25 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 890 16 Feb 22:08 im-multipress.conf
$
– from a separate installation of PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTJAN2016 it seems, that's the norm. From discussion in irc://chat.freenode.net/#pcbsd it's assumed that their nonexistence implies default values.
Selected comments from beyond Stack Exchange
From a developer:
Sorry Graham, I don't really have an idea of what could be causing this. Looks like gtk is going nuts on your system, or some lower-level X issues.
Good luck …
Background
As far as I recall, the problem in my case arose from intentionally aggressive testing of PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENTFEB2016 with portmaster(8). During a run of portmaster, probably –
sudo portmaster -GaD
– I launched a type of application that might cause the hardware (Ergo Vista 621 notebook with Intel GM45 graphics) to blackout with anything more recent than 11.0-CURRENTNOV2015. Sure enough, a blackout occurred with no response to Control-Alt-F2 and so I pressed the power button to shut down the system as gracefully as possible in the midst of works by portmaster.
I have ZFS boot environments for both 11.0-CURRENTNOV2015 and 11.0-CURRENTFEB2016. Since the problem occurred whilst testing the latter, the symptom is present in both environments.
Best Answer
Without identifying the troublesome package
Laziness – without the desired learning.
Instead of performing a change of branch from 10.2-RELEASE to 11.0-CURRENT, I removed from 11.0-CURRENTNOV2015 most of the packages that were not of immediate interest to me.
Now XTerm and various other applications appear good. An example:
xfontsel
Yes. Now I see that rendering in xfontsel is relatively poor.
Identification of the package that most likely caused the problem
From the details below, someone might recognise a likely culprit.
If an additional answer helps me to identify the offending package, I'll happily:
Details of removals
Using pkg(7)
Round one
Focused on removal of some desktop environments.
icewmwas remarkable:So I used
pkgto (re)install icewm –– then remove it:
Round two (outline)
I used
pkgto set to non-automatic the packages that I wished to keep.Then the
autoremovecommand ofpkgto –– then removal of some other stuff (probably relating to MATE), then another
autoremoveroutine.Finally I attended to a handful of packages that I wanted to reinstall (evince, gnome-characters, gnome-screenshot, gnome-system-monitor, nautilus, xfontsel).
Selected outputs from terminal windows