Bug#320054: installation-reports: [sparc][netboot] Gui/character set problem when booting 2.6 kernel
Package: installation-reports
Severity: normal
So I booted:
http://people.debian.org/~stappers/d-i/images/2005-07-26/sparc64/netboot/boot.img
and
http://people.debian.org/~stappers/d-i/images/2005-07-26/sparc64/netboot/2.6/boot.img
They were booted on a Sun Blade 100 using netboot, I added the
ramdisk_size=9000 to the prompt to avoid bug 319788. At this point I
notice the following:
The 2.4 images boots the installer nicely, it shows the language
selection splashscreen as expected. The problem occurs when booting the
2.6 kernel. When it is booted the border (the border is the black line
in the gray area) of the selection dialog is gone, and it looks like the characters are shifted one position to the right. When changing a selection English looks like EEnglish (for example). This could be related to bug 282781 or 296735. The difference is that the machine stays responsive and you could finish the installation this way, but it looks ugly.
A solution to this problem is the following. Press ctrl+f1, activate the
shell, execute 'debian-installer', the installer starts and the problem
is gone. When you switch between tty0 and tty1 you can clearly see that
everything is shifted one (or multiple characters) to the left (the
number of characters is equal to the number of character that make up
the border, meaning the lower line is fully gone, the body is shifted
one to the left and the title is left aligned instead of centered).
To summarize:
When booting a 2.6 kernel, the installer that appears on the first
console is fscked up, as is each installer launched on that console.
Especially that characers that make up the border are missing. On
the second console everything looks/works just fine.
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