GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 138961
WinXP crash on startup
Last modified: 2004-04-04 17:26:55 UTC
Install GTK and GIMP from http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/stable.html Once installed, run the GIMP GIMP crashes every time, reporting: (gimp-2.0.exe:1916): GLib-CRITICAL **: file gconvert.c: line 498 (g_convert): as sertion `str != NULL' failed
The crash always occurs during the startup process at "Looking for data files: Fonts"
This is just another duplicate of bug #132366. The workaround is to find the faulty fonts and edit C:\Documents and Settings\<your_user_name>\.fonts.cache-1, removing the offending characters from their corresponding font name entries. If you use Notepad to edit the file, you'll probably want to set line wrapping off as the lines are long and the font name is near the start of each line. Perhaps looking for "Fontographer" with the Windows version of "grep" in the fonts directory may help locating these offending fonts. Can you please try and report back whether looking for "Fontographer" does help? I wonder if leaving this bug open will help people find it more easily instead of reporting it again and again.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 132366 ***
I've got a hell of a lot of fonts and I'm not sure which are faulty. Would the file be regenerated if I just deleted it (based on that fact that the name is "cache")?
The problematic fonts are always "*.fon". Yes, the file will be regenerated if you delete it but that won't help if there are lots of troublesome fonts, since the chance of hitting a wrong Unicode string increases drastically. As I said, try "grep" on the Fonts directory from a console. You can get grep from e.g. http://unxutils.sf.net which is standalone. Open a terminal, change to your Windows dir then type: C:\Windows> cd fonts C:\Windows\Fonts> grep -l Fontographer *.fon That should show a list of potentially faulty fonts.
I removed all lines containing ".fon" from .fonts.cache-1 and the GIMP loads successfully. It's a shame the GIMP no longer works straight out of the box; perhaps there could be a script to sort this out automatically?
The problem has been sorted out and will be fixed in future releases, see bug #132366.