13 replies to this topic

[amrosama]

hi guys
im using ubuntu.
ive been trying to solve this for over 6 hours.

how i reached this:
i wanted to use arabic for writing some text on a project im working on so i installed the arabic language packages everything was normal and i can read arabic text but i couldnt use arabic as input language . so i modified the keyboard layout to "arabic qwerty" worked partially because i didnt reboot.
so i rebooted!
booting was normal till i reached the login window, when i enter a username it only writes arabic, i cant switch to arabic. i didnt panic, because theres "change language" on the lower left part of the login screen i selected english and i was shocked that it did nothing

what ive tried and failed at
1. using the recovery mode , but it only accepts arabic even in the root shell
2. using failsafe terminal, didnt work because i only write arabic
3. used a livecd to add new user with only digits i created a user using "adduser 22" and the password was digits as well, but i failed because when i tried to logining in it accepted username and password but nothing happens because theres no user home directory -.-
4. used livecd and created a home directory for a new user, when i logged in it said that the home directory permissions arnt set correctly
5. ive also tried making the two users i added before administrators by editing the "etc/group" and "etc/passwd" but i couldnt login in with them because administrators arnt allowed to login from that screen
6. when i really got frustrated i used live cd, mounted the file system and used "sudo chroot /media/disk" and kept removing all arabic related packages, but there was noo change at ALL


can you help me please, i cant install another ubuntu/linux.
juicy +rep for the one with the solution

[ZekeDragon]

Try this:

Log in with Live CD, mount your main hard drive (probably hda1), and locate it in your file system (it should be either in /media or /mnt). When you find it, open up your terminal, cd to it and then type this:

sudo gedit etc/default/console-setup

Scroll down and you should find this:

# The following variables describe your keyboard and can have the same
# values as the XkbModel, XkbLayout, XkbVariant and XkbOptions options
# in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="af"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS=""

Change "af" to "us" and reboot. See if that works.

[amrosama]

OMG its working
thnx alooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot +++++++++++rep
i cant be more thankful, do you need an Egyptian slave? i can be yours..

[amrosama]

you dont know how much that helped me and saved time

[amrosama]

lmao -.-

[amrosama]

hehehe
it was really frustrating man, i wasted like 6 hours googling and trying stuff

[ZekeDragon]

I'm glad I could help. :)

What did you have on your Ubuntu machine? Will you backup now? XD

[amrosama]

it had zend studio 7, the 64bit version which i dont have it's source anymore and some unreleased/unfinished javascript projects ive been working hard on

everything is safe now, thanks to you :)

[debtboy]

Great job Zeke!! +rep

[John]

amrosama said:

3. used a livecd to add new user with only digits i created a user using "adduser 22" and the password was digits as well, but i failed because when i tried to logining in it accepted username and password but nothing happens because theres no user home directory -.-
4. used livecd and created a home directory for a new user, when i logged in it said that the home directory permissions arnt set correctly
5. ive also tried making the two users i added before administrators by editing the "etc/group" and "etc/passwd" but i couldnt login in with them because administrators arnt allowed to login from that screen

Did you use adduser or useradd? I believe adduser is a perl script that creates the home directory, creates a password, and copies the skeleton files to the new home directory. It uses useradd, which itself only creates a user account, unless you specify flags. I may have these backwards.

# sudo useradd -d /home/foo/ -m foo

# passwd foo

However, adduser does all of this, at least in English it does. :)