When running X on Slackware 9.1 I occasionally see little boxes with four numbers instead of letters in some applications (mozilla to name one). It's somehow related to foreign language support and I have tried installing glibc-i18n and liniconv but neither of them helped any. My current LANG is:

LANG=en_US.ISO8859-15

Would anyone happen to know what's this all about? It's getting real annoying so please help!

If it happens when you are viewing foreign language websites using moz, try clicking on "view" and then "character encoding" and change the encoding to match the website's language.

I have a similar problem with moz on Chinese sites, but Opera works better for auto-detecting languages. Konq, Firefox, Moz, Opera. You can have many browsers installed, and just choose the one that works best for the site...

I'm a bit confused because foreign language support worked fine in my old RedHat 7.1 installation (also in mozilla I could see russian and such texts just fine). I'm almost sure it has something to do with GTK2...

Changing character encoding in mozilla doesn't seem to have any effect on the problem in my system and I kind of dislike the idea of having to have several browsers installed... Besides this, it's not only mozilla where I see these stupid boxes. Also xffm (the hideous file manager of xfce desktop environment) shows them in some cases, as well as Tux Commander (which is almost nice for a file manager) and GVIM (on some documents anyway).

Sounds like you have a fonts issue...
Try this 'Fix them fonts'
from here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...987#post919987

Thanks, that helped a bit but it didn't get me all the way. While I can now see for example russian correctly, I still have problems with some sites displaying umlauts and such... Also the boxes are still present in xffm...