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I have a fresh Arch setup with the following installed:

  • xterm
  • openbox
  • tint2

Now after starting tint2, the panel in the lower left-hand corner displays what seems to be a working panel, but with boxes instead of text:

tint2 panel

What I think is a related problem is menus that have no text inside them at all, yet has working links:

enter image description here

I suspect this has something to do with openbox, but it could be Arch itself or even tint2.

I should also note that I get errors when starting tint2, a whole lot of "Could not open file" referring to applications that don't even exist on my system such as firefox.desktop, iceweasel.desktop, chromium-browser.desktop, and google-chrome.desktop. There are also errors loading icons, which I assumed would have come bundled with the tint2 install. Two lines read:

tint2: Loading additional icon themes (this means your icon theme is incomplete)...

tint2: Could not find icon 'application-x-executable', using default.

Another error later on, possibly related:

tint2: pixmap background detection failed

Some other errors:

tint2: No XSETTINGS manager, tint2 uses config option 'launcher_icon_theme'.

tint2: Loading config file: /home/jeremy/.config/tint2/tint2rc

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Jeremy Lindsay
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  • Those empty boxes and menus usually mean that you don't have suitable fonts installed. Please include the output of `pacman -Q|grep xorg-fonts`. – JigglyNaga Oct 24 '18 at 09:52
  • The `tint2` errors are unrelated to the font problem, and deserve a separate question. – JigglyNaga Oct 24 '18 at 09:53

1 Answers1

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Those empty lines and boxes are what are displayed when X applications can't find a suitable font. You can test whether any fonts are available by running fc-list.

In Arch, there's no default font package. Installing xorg-fonts-misc will be enough to make OpenBox and Tint2 usable:

pacman -S xorg-fonts-misc

The resulting text may be quite basic (fixed-width). Packages that provide proportional fonts include xorg-fonts-type1, ttf-bitstream-vera, and ttf-dejavu.

JigglyNaga
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