“Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion” – how to resolve the xclock warning message

Question :

Execution of xclock command triggers with the error ‘Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion’.

# xclock
Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion
Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset

Solution

:
This happens due to the incorrect setting for locale environment variable LC_ALL. In most cases, if you check the users locale variables using the below command you would fine that the varibale LC_ALL is empty.

# locale | grep LC_ALL
LC_ALL=

Follow the steps below to resolve it.

1. Set the LC_ALL=C variable using the below command

# export LC_ALL=C

2. To make this change permanent for a particular user, add the required entries in the .bash_profile file.

# vi /home/[username]/.bash_profile
LC_ALL=C
export LC_ALL

For example, to add it to a user “testuser”‘s profile :

# vi /home/testuser/.bash_profile
LC_ALL=C
export LC_ALL

3. To verify the settings :

# echo $LC_ALL
C