garbage text

[doonan]

After using Kickstart to install a live site onto my local server (for a major re-work). as often as not, pages on the front and back end are filled with garbage text (see attached screen shot).

Any idea what's causing this?

david

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live site info

PHP Built On FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE #0: Fri Jan 30 14:40:51 EST 2015 AMD64 amd64
Database Version 5.5.35-log
Database Collation utf8_general_ci
PHP Version 5.3.29
Web Server Apache/2.2.29
WebServer to PHP Interface apache2handler
Joomla! Version Joomla! 2.5.28 Stable [ Ember ] 10-December-2014 15:00 GMT
Joomla! Platform Version Joomla Platform 11.4.0 Stable [ Brian Kernighan ] 03-Jan-2012 00:00 GMT
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/600.6.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.6 Safari/600.6.3

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local computer site info

PHP Built On Darwin Davids-iMac.local 14.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 14.3.0: Mon Mar 23 11:59:05 PDT 2015; root:xnu-2782.20.48~5/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
Database Version 5.5.25
Database Collation utf8_general_ci
PHP Version 5.4.4
Web Server Apache/2.2.22 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8zd DAV/2 PHP/5.4.4
WebServer to PHP Interface apache2handler
Joomla! Version Joomla! 2.5.28 Stable [ Ember ] 10-December-2014 15:00 GMT
Joomla! Platform Version Joomla Platform 11.4.0 Stable [ Brian Kernighan ] 03-Jan-2012 00:00 GMT
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/43.0.2357.81 Safari/537.36 OPR/30.0.1835.59

Screen Shot 2015-06-18 at 1.28.25 PM.png

[itoctopus]

If you create a very simple PHP file and place it under the root directory of the Joomla site, will you also get gibberish? If this is the case, then your server has some problems.

If the above is not the case, then it might be that your Joomla website is using compression but your server doesn't understand it, and thus it serves the gibberish text. In this case, try disabling any compression commands/settings found either in the .htaccess file or in the configuration.php file.