On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 12:44:57PM -0800, I wrote:
After installing the realplayer Linux... the config screen is full of little square boxes where the text should be. ... Here's my setup: SuSE 7.3 distro, with KDE 2-something/Qt2, X11-3.3.6, kernel upgraded to 2.4.23, Intel P-II.
For others who may still be wrestling with this, it turns out it's a general X11 issue related to Unicode fonts, which are 16-bit. I just happened to hit it with RP, but apparently there are other X11 apps that exhibit the problem, when the app expects an 8-bit font, but gets the 16-bit one instead, and isn't clever enough to know the difference. The simplest solution is to add a line to your Xdefaults resources: RealPlayer*fontList: -*-helvetica-medium-r-normal--14-*-iso8859-* which urges RP to find the 8-bit 8859 fonts instead of the alternatives. You can use xfontsel to select your favorite font and size, then run: ``xrdb -merge .Xdefaults'' (or whatever resource file you used) to activate the change. Other potential solutions involve upgrading to X11-4.2.0 or later, or reducing your FontPath in /etc/XF86config to simply: unix/:7100 and using xfs to serve up all the fonts. But since the resource did the trick for me, I didn't try these other possibilities. FWIW, Jim