Reproduced on Ubuntu 12.10, Inkscape 0.48+devel r11772: the initial height of the list of glyphs is minimal (due to no scrollbar elements provided by the Gtk theme).
Works better if launching Inkscape without the overlay scrollbars:
$ LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 inkscape
Reproduced on Ubuntu 12.10, Inkscape 0.48+devel r11772: the initial height of the list of glyphs is minimal (due to no scrollbar elements provided by the Gtk theme).
Works better if launching Inkscape without the overlay scrollbars: SCROLLBAR= 0 inkscape
$ LIBOVERLAY_