installation issues: fonts and launcher icon

[Dave Touretzky]

Running xemacs21 on Ubuntu 16.04. xemacs was installed via "apt-get install xemacs21". On startup, I consistently get this message:

Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-bold-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion

Also, instead of getting a nice Xemacs icon in the dock, I get the generic gray icon with a question mark.

These seem to be issues with the package installation process.

> cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS"

> apt-cache policy xemacs21
xemacs21:
  Installed: 21.4.22-14ubuntu1
  Candidate: 21.4.22-14ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 21.4.22-14ubuntu1 500
        500 http://aptrepo-omega.srv.cs.cmu.edu/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://aptrepo-omega.srv.cs.cmu.edu/ubuntu xenial/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[era (era)]

This isn't really a XEmacs problem. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=816658

Notice that XEmacs is increasingly stale and basically unsupported. Even if you dislike GNU Emacs, it might be a better option than running software which hasn't been received any upstream updates for nearly 10 years.