Googlefood on fixing a problem I've been having.

[catsidhe]

So, I was getting resigned[1] to Firefox continually crashing out whenever I was doing anything complicated and intensive like reading The Age, reading my Gmail, or attempting to update LJ[2].

I brought up devhelp, and it gave exactly the same error as FF was before it would segfault and die horribly. For the record (and the benefit of Google), the error is

** (program_name:pid): WARNING **: Exception in gr::RangeSegment

This was obviously not a FF problem alone. I remembered seeing Pango in the trace when FF had last segfaulted, so I added that to the google terms, and came up with a suggestion that the pango-graphite package was doing the damage.

I had a look through aptitude. Pango-graphite is a package which extends the graphite libraries into pango, which is the text presentation layer for GTK. It apparently is to access various smart features of appropriate fonts (such as the SIL set) such as contextual ligatures and variant glyphs. Being as I am a language and type geek, I had installed this without a second thought when I was installing 8.04 before the break. At inspection, it is recommended by four SIL fonts, and there are no other dependencies, so I purged it, and no more RangeSegment errors for me.[3]

Yay me.



Alas, it does not seem to have completely solved the problem, as I have already had to restore this post from draft once, but no more errors, and the browser response is much snappier, there not being another layer of glyph translation before the text gets onto the screen. Several wierdnesses have gone away too, so the presentation of Oldstyle numerals and the like must have been a side effect of graphite. It was cute on one level, but at the same time the glyphs were blurry on screen, and a bit hard to read. Ahead on points, I think.


So: advice.

If you have pango-graphite installed and get RangeSegment errors and spontaneous segfaults from Firefox/Iceweasel, or other programs which use the Pango presentation engine, uninstall pango-graphite and see if that fixes it. You probably don't need it, geeking about the possibility of contextual ligatures aside.

---

[1] for values of ‘resigned’ being ‘increasingly irritated, shading into pissed off, with the frustration of not knowing how to fix it and a cherry on top’
[2] the combination of “restore session” and “restore from saved draft” saved several gems of insight and pearls of outrage.
[3] If you do not understand any of this paragraph, don't worry. Not many people would. Just take my advice that if you don't know if you need pango-graphite or not, you almost certainly don't need it.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_zombiemonkey/]

I try to live by the adage: Switch geeky tech-thing on if you absolutely know you need it, don't touch on pain of death if you don't know what the hell it is.

This seems to have steered me mostly right so far.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I have the (dis)advantage of being one of those people who does usually have a pretty good idea what the geeky tech-thing is, and am just as likely to want to find out if it is something I could learn to need.

... if that makes sense.

[(Anonymous)]

opera ftw!

-- mpp