Some standard LCD skin plugins for the T4 cause hangs

[Wade Coxon]

Several standard oe-alliance LCD skins are available in the T4's plugin repository.

Installing a new LCD skin requires a GUI reboot, but upon installing some of the alternative skins, the GUI reboot would just hang at 62% and the T4 appeared to be trying to repeatedly restart the enigma2 process.

From memory, two of the skins that I tried that would cause the GUI reboot to fail were oe-alliance skins 4 and 7, while skin 10 was one of the working ones.

To recover from the restart loop, I ran "init 3" from the command prompt, then edited "/etc/enigma2/settings" to change the skin to a working one (skin 10).

Options would be to:

1) Find out what makes the skins break the T4 and fix the T4 so that it is compatible;

2) Fix the skin (presumably would have to go upstream for that);

3) Remove the offending skins from the plugin manager; or

4) Remove all oe-alliance skins from the plugin manager.

If options 1, 2, or 3 are preferred, then I can compile a list of which ones are broken.

[prl]

To recover from the restart loop, I ran "init 3" from the command prompt, then edited "/etc/enigma2/settings" to change the skin to a working one (skin 10).

You'd actually want to do "init 4", edit /etc/settings, then "init 3".

[prl]

This appears to be a font problem. oe-a-lcdskin-2 through to oe-a-lcdskin-6 try to load fonts that aren't in the Beyonwiz image. Lcdskin-3 uses font file MyriadPro-Regular.otf and the others use analog.ttf. Lcdskin-3 also uses lcd.ttf, but that is in the Beyonwiz image.

Skins lcdskin-1, 7 8, 9 and 10 only use font nmsbd.ttf and all load without a problem. I haven't checked what their coverage of screens is like.

I can't find package that includes those fonts in the standard feeds.

Anyway, that opens other alternatives:

5) add fonts analog.ttf and MyriadPro-Regular.otf to the Beyonwiz image 6) add packages that contain analog.ttf and MyriadPro-Regular.otf to the feed and add dependencies to those packages to the (upstream?) skin packages.

[Peter Urbanec]

Option 6 seems like the most sensible one, but someone needs to work with the skin authors.

If that won't fly, then removing those skins from the Beyonwiz feeds is probably the safest bet.

[IanSav]

Another option would be to stop Enigma2 crashing and boot looping just because a font can't be found.

If a font isn't found then simply substitute another font in its place and continue booting. Given that the font behind "Regular" should usually be available then perhaps this should be the substitution font that is used.

Making this fix may be easier and would certainly fix all the boot loops due to missing fonts. (Creating a missing font is an all to easy thing to do.)

[Peter Urbanec]

stop Enigma2 crashing and boot looping just because a font can't be found.

Yes, definitely a good idea.

[Peter Urbanec]

Can you please update this bug with the crash info from the log?

[Wade Coxon]

I have just tried skins 4 and 7 on my T4 running 16.1 firmware.

Those two troublesome skins no longer appear to crash the T4 on boot.

Skin 4 doesn't show sensible information on the screen. Just a progress bar at live TV and no text at all. No text is displayed when in menus, and in standby, the display is blank as well.

Skin 7 appears to work normally.

The severity of this bug can probably be downgraded as a result, but there is probably still scope for having a skin with missing fonts choose a sensible alternate when its specified font is missing so that the text is not invisible.

[Peter Urbanec]

Is this still an issue?

[prl]

None of oe-a-lcdskin-1 - oe-a-lcdskin-10 cause a crash loop on the T4.

oe-a-lcdskin-2 - oe-a-lcdskin-6 have broken live TV skins that don’t display in the way that their images in MENU>Setup>System>Front panel skins imply that they should.

oe-a-lcdskin-1 and oe-a-lcdskin-7 - oe-a-lcdskin-10 appear to have working front panel skins for live TV.

I didn’t check the skin functions beyond live TV (which is usually the most complicayted screen skin in the skin.

[Peter Urbanec]

Seems like the crashes are no longer occurring.