Messed up. How to reinstall/restore fonts on ubuntu 14.04?

2

I tried to install some fonts on Ubuntu and instead messed up rendering fonts on ubuntu altogether.

Currently, all fonts in all apps (except for Chrome which I'm typing in now) render characters as 'empty squares', including the system itself such as terminal, etc.

Of course this is completely unusable. Last thing I remembered trying was something like (to get newly installed fonts to work (from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1976037)

sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/*

Could this have caused the issue? Anyone got any clue what to try to get Ubuntu running normal again?

Geert-Jan

Posted 2015-05-18T16:57:40.593

Reputation: 1 413

if its solely graphical that is screwy from tty reinstall your graphical `` sudo apt-get reinstall $graphical (for ex. gnome,kde,cinnamon,lxde) then re-login or reboot – linuxdev2013 – 2015-05-18T18:29:34.123

Answers

0

If you need to (terminal is totally unuseable) chroot into your installed system (with networking ) and reinstall truetype* 

 sudo apt-get install truetype\*

linuxdev2013

Posted 2015-05-18T16:57:40.593

Reputation: 1 051

1Thanks. It seems I tty1 terminal works and displays fonts correctly. However doing the above shows couldn't find any package by regex truetype*. The fact that tty1 works: would that mean the problem is with the graphical skin instead? Total noob I'm afraid :/ – Geert-Jan – 2015-05-18T18:15:24.757

Asked: 2015-05-18T16:57:40.593

Viewed: 1 501 times

Active: 2015-05-18T17:21:18.723