Star Wars screensaver doesn't handle non-ASCII well

[Vincent Lönngren]

With my current locale, the date is string looks like this: lör apr 26 09:56:22 EEST 2008. The 'ö' here is not displayed well in the Star Wars screensaver. It looks like a typical case of interpreting UTF-8 as something else. The starwars command outputs messages like these:

starwars: font -*-utopia-bold-r-normal-*-*-720-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1 does not exist, using -*-times-bold-r-normal-*-180-*
starwars: unable to load font "-*-utopia-bold-r-normal-*-*-720-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1", using "-*-times-bold-r-normal-*-240-*"

although I doubt they have anything to do with it.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I am unable to find any star wars screensaver in the Ubuntu repositories, is it a 3rd party screensaver? Can you try this in Karmic 9.10 please? If it still fails, please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:

apport-collect 222367

This will help us to find and resolve the problem. Bear in mind that you may need to install the python-launchpadlib package from the universe repository. Additionally, when prompted to give apport-collect permissions for Launchpad you will need to give it at least the ability to "Change Non-Private" data as it will be adding information to your bug report. Thanks in advance!

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport, either via the appropriate application's "Help -> Report a Problem" menu or using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Starwars is in the xscreensaver-gl-extra package. The bug can be reproduced with:
  /usr/lib/xscreensaver/starwars -program 'echo write ö here'
(or any other non-ascii character in the string)

Unfortunately, the xscreensaver code is not very good at UTF-8. It uses iso-8859-1, so this will work:
 /usr/lib/xscreensaver/starwars -program 'echo write ö here | iconv -f utf8 -t iso-8859-1'

[xteejx (xteejx)]

You shouldn't really confirm your own bugs but it was correct anyway :)
I can confirm this, will add apport-collect info, and thanks for reporting this.

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Architecture: i386
Dependencies:

DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: xscreensaver None [modified: /var/lib/dpkg/info/xscreensaver.list]
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-15-generic i686
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[xteejx (xteejx)]

My version:
xscreensaver-gl-extra:
  Installed: 5.07-0ubuntu3
  Candidate: 5.07-0ubuntu3
  Version table:
 *** 5.07-0ubuntu3 0
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

What version of Ubuntu are you using? I realised apport hook for xscreensaver only works in Karmic, but there should be enough information here to begin working on this problem, so I will mark it as triaged.

[Tormod Volden (tormodvolden)]

Teej, I (Tormod) confirmed Vincent's bug report...

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Oh sorry, it was a long night last night I must have missed the reporters name :)

[xteejx (xteejx)]

Also the same in Maverick
xscreensaver-gl-extra:
  Installed: 5.11-1ubuntu2

[Daniel Carrasco Guariento (sirwhiteout)]

The bug is still present in Oneiric.

xscreensaver-gl-extra 5.14-1ubuntu1

[Oskar Wallgren (oskar-wallgren13)]

From the xscreensaver 5.31 changelog:
UTF-8 text support (instead of only Latin1) and antialiased text on X11 with Xft (instead of only on OSX/iOS) in fontglide, noseguy, fliptext, starwars, and winduprobot. The other text-displaying hacks (apple2, phosphor, xmatrix, and gltext) also now accept UTF-8 input, though they convert it to Latin1 or ASCII.

Fixed in xenial and later.