Linux Text Issues

[parkerwb]

Linux text just renders as blocks not letters. HUD, "game saved", map names etc. Terminals are fine. Any ideas would be appreciated. I'm not very adept at compiling for linux etc, but tried getting everything enabled.

version 20230119

./configure:

Summary of optional features:

Enabled: OpenGL rendering
Enabled: built-in Lua scripting
Enabled: SDL2_image support
Enabled: FFmpeg playback and film export
Enabled: libmad MP3 playback
Enabled: libsndfile audio decoding
Enabled: libvorbis Ogg/Vorbis music playback

Not found: SMPEG movie playback Enabled: Speex net mic playback Enabled: ALSA net mic transmission Enabled: cURL for HTTP communication Enabled: zziplib support Enabled: libpng PNG screenshot support Enabled: miniupnpc support

[treellama]

Aleph One uses display lists to draw that text. I wonder if your OpenGL stack is buggy?

Can you post your glxinfo for posterity?

[parkerwb]

Hey treellama... thanks for the reply. I'm the same guy that posted to Reddit awhile back about this, but thought this would be a better venue. It's an old 2013 MacPro running Debian Testing with AMD Pitcairn graphics. I've attached my glxinfo. glxinfo.txt

[treellama]

Haha I thought, that's the second time I've seen that weird bug. But it's not!

[treellama]

I can tell you, anyway, I have it running in macOS 12 on the same machine, without the issue. So it's not hardware. Are there fglrx drivers for that card?

[parkerwb]

Doesn't seem to be possible for Debian 11... legecy kernel libc etc. I may just switch back to Monterey, but I've been trying so hard to leave the Apple ecosystem headlock haha.

[parkerwb]

Hey treellama... finally got around to installing the Flatpak version of Alephone one and am still seeing the block text issue. Debian 12, Wayland, PITCAIRN AMD graphics. Will try some other things like X instead of Wayland etc. and report back.

[treellama]

This really looks like a driver issue. You could try one of the replacement HUDs, maybe they render in a different way? Or, there's always software mode :(

[michaelneverwins]

I'm seeing the same issue on Linux Mint 21.1.

I'm quite sure I had a working HUD with earlier versions of Linux Mint (perhaps most recently Linux Mint 20.3), but I'm not willing to roll back my OS version to verify that. I did try compiling some older versions of Aleph One (1.6, 1.5, 1.4) and saw the same thing in each.

I don't know what kind of system information might be useful to anyone debugging this, so I'll just follow @parkerwb's lead and upload my glxinfo output: glxinfo.log

Edit:

Text on the "Enhanced HUD" is also unreadable with OpenGL rendering. Switching to software rendering, as suggested by @treellama, makes the text readable. (I suppose it's possible that, when I had a working HUD on some older version of Linux Mint, I was actually using software rendering. But I don't remember doing that.)

[michaelneverwins]

I'm no longer having this problem with Aleph One 1.8 (release-20240510) compiled on Linux Mint 21.3.

The following screenshot was taken with default settings, namely with the Rendering System option still set to OpenGL.

[treellama]

So, likely a driver issue with GL display lists. Are you able to try older versions and verify?

[michaelneverwins]

I reinstalled version 1.6, one of the versions I had called out in my 2023/04/02 comment. I think the latest release as of that comment was version 1.6.1, but I don't remember whether I had actually checked out the tag release-20230119 or just pulled the latest commits as of that date. Meanwhile, I would have checked out release-20221126 for the earlier version 1.6, so I can repeat exactly that:

sudo make uninstall
git fetch
git checkout master
git pull
git checkout release-20221126
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
sudo make install

Result: Text in the HUD is readable. Assuming I haven't done something wrong in testing, the issue seems to have been resolved (at least for me) by a change outside of Aleph One.