Ubuntu
gdm package

XKeepsCrashing spews UTF-8 on non-UTF-8 terminal

Bug #56024 reported by Paul Sladen on 2006-08-11

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #3498: Curses box uses wrong characters when X cannot start. Edit Remove

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	console-setup (Ubuntu)	New	Undecided	Unassigned
	gdm (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Low	Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

When X is failing to start, gdm transfers control to:

/etc/gdm/XKeepsCrashing

which then displays helpful dialogues on a text-termainl. The box-drawing output used by '/bin/usr/fmt' spews UTF-8 output onto a terminal that is not running in UTF-8 mode, causing ugliness that wraps around the right-hand-side of the console and causes corruption.

Revision history for this message

John Vivirito (gnomefreak) wrote on 2006-10-09:

Thank you for reporting this bug. Is this on edgy or dapper? Is it the GDM thats crashing or X? Can you please attach any log in /var/crash/ (if on edgy) and on either can you please attach /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/xorg.conf files.

Changed in gdm:
status:	Unconfirmed → Needs Info

Revision history for this message

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2006-12-08:

Confirmed, the dialog is easy to get, move /usr/bin/X somewhere else and restart gdm by example

Changed in gdm:
importance:	Undecided → Low
status:	Needs Info → Confirmed
assignee:	nobody → desktop-bugs

Revision history for this message

Anders Kaseorg (andersk) wrote on 2007-05-03:

This still happens in Feisty and Gutsy.

Revision history for this message

Anders Kaseorg (andersk) wrote on 2007-05-03:

The dialog is being displayed on a console that hasn’t been set up by console-setup. It displays correctly if I change ACTIVE_CONSOLES from "/dev/tty[1-6]" to "/dev/tty[1-8]" in /etc/default/console-setup, *and* boot without usplash. (It seems that console-setup doesn’t work at all from within usplash! Has anyone noticed this before?)