I can confirm this behaviour. I modified /etc/environment to LANG="C", LANGUAGE="C", and things came back to life. I then set it to LANG="en_GB" and LANGUAGE="en_GB" and it still worked. Now with the default of LANG="en_GB.UTF-8" and LANGUAGE="en_GB:en" then I get the font problems.
Definitely looks like a locale problem. -- Unable to load any usable fontset https://launchpad.net/bugs/2066 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
