Gramps detected incomplete GTK installation

[Peter Hewett]

Fresh install of Kubuntu 15.10 Wily, and gramps (v 4.2.0) installed from repository. On first (and every) start of gramps, it gives an error message "Gramps detected an incomplete GTK installation".

$ apt-cache policy gramps
gramps:
  Installed: 4.2.0~dfsg-1
  Candidate: 4.2.0~dfsg-1
  Version table:
 *** 4.2.0~dfsg-1 0
        500 http://nz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Ross Gammon (rosco2)]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for reporting this, and sorry it took so long to respond.

I vaguely remember seeing this just before the Wily 15.10 Release, but then it went away before I had time to investigate.

$ LANG=en_NZ gramps works fine for me in Wily and in Xenial. It is possible that the underlying gtk libraries changed at some point.

Do you still see this error?

[Peter Hewett (peter-hewett)]

Yes, this error message comes up with every start of gramps.

I reported the bug because it was a fresh install of Kubuntu and gramps from the repository (and therefore something that any user would get). I normally use the current stable version of gramps from Sourceforge, and have now updated to gramps 4.2.2. The error still comes up at every start of gramps.

[Peter Hewett (peter-hewett)]

Current variable values on machine that produces this error;

 $ printenv | grep LANG
LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en

[Peter Hewett (peter-hewett)]

If I install this package:
 language-pack-gnome-en
then gramps starts without the error message.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gramps (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Peter Hewett (peter-hewett)]

This bug also occurs with Kubuntu 16.04 and the default install of Gramps.

[Ross Gammon (rosco2)]

Thanks Peter. I was looking for this bug and I couldn't find it (because it had expired - doh!). And thanks also for diagnosing that it is the missing language pack that is the problem.

I suspect that I cannot fix this in Debian/Ubuntu, because I cannot easily recommend every language pack according to the configured LOCALE. But I will investigate if the error message can be improved to give users better guidance about the fix.

[Peter Hewett (peter-hewett)]

This problem didn't happen with earlier versions of Kubuntu and Gramps. I have used Gramps on Kubuntu for many years (about ten years) and I didn't see this problem before Kubuntu 15.10. So hopefully there is an elegant way of addressing this issue.

[Ross Gammon (rosco2)]

Hi Peter,

I have been playing around with a fresh install of Ubuntu GNOME this morning, and I still cannot replicate your issue with Gramps 4.2.2. I couldn't use Kubuntu because there is an installer bug in Virtual Machines at the moment.

During the install I choose English, then my location in Europe, then my keyboard (again a special European one). I end up with US English as default.

Then I do $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales, and choose only en_NZ.UTF-8, and set it as the default. After logging out, and logging back in, I get:
$ printenv | grep LANG
LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
gramps comes up without error.

So I manually set LANGUAGE as you have:
$ LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en
$ export LANGUAGE
$ printenv | grep LANG
LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Gramps still comes up without error.

How did you go about selecting your language? Can you please give me the result of "$ locale -a"?

[Peter Hewett (peter-hewett)]

Hi Ross
Thanks for checking this out.

I don't recall doing anything in particular to set LANGUAGE. Perhaps it is inferred during the installation. This is a fresh install of Kubuntu 16.04.

$ locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX

Some other users have reported similar symptoms, eg with en_AU
https://sourceforge.net/p/gramps/mailman/message/35064117/
This is from the Gramps users mailing list, 4 May 2016.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gramps (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[surendra beniwal (sbnwl)]

Just bumping here because this happens with fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.04.1 (Bionic Beaver).

I just need to pullout language-pack-gnome-en package with:

    sudo apt-get install language-pack-gnome-en

after which the following locales are generated:

Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_AG.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done
  en_CA.UTF-8... done
  en_DK.UTF-8... done
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
  en_HK.UTF-8... done
  en_IE.UTF-8... done
  en_IL.UTF-8... done
  en_IN.UTF-8... done
  en_NG.UTF-8... done
  en_NZ.UTF-8... done
  en_PH.UTF-8... done
  en_SG.UTF-8... done
  en_ZA.UTF-8... done
  en_ZM.UTF-8... done
  en_ZW.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
Setting up language-pack-gnome-en (1:18.04+20180712) ...

NOW gramps_4.2.8 launches without complain.

[private_lock (private-lock)]

This is gramps 5.1.5 in Kubuntu 22.04 with German usually chosen as preferred language.

For some international members of my family, I want to print English reports. So I followed your advice:
https://www.gramps-project.org/wiki/index.php/Howto:Change_the_language_of_reports

of launching gramps with this command:
$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 gramps

and ran into the error described here. After installing "language-pack-gnome-en" the issue is gone. Only the error message was not helpful - I had to research this bug on the Internet first.

In addition, I must say, that it's a weird concept to force me, to run the program e.g. in Arabic to do a report for those people - because I cannot read the Arabic script - so how am I going to identify the correct menu item?

Gramps is a very useful tool - I love it!