Comment 57 for bug 701060

On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 04:07:02PM -0000, peterzay wrote:
> Before trying your suggestions, have you reviewed Bug #425979 which
> documents problems with both SHIFT and ESC for Grub2 on certain
> machines?

I'm familiar with that issue; it's specific to key handling during early
boot (bootloader, before the kernel has started) and should not affect
keyhandling under plymouth.

> As for orange vs red animated dots, that's probably screen colour
> balance and subjective interpretation.

> What do you mean by: Do Alt+Left, Alt+Right, or Alt+Fn keys work at this
> point? Do you mean LeftAlt+Fn or RightAlt+Fn (n=1,2,3,...,12)? Please
> clarify.

These keys should allow you to switch VTs, away from plymouth to either a
blank screen or (possibly) a login prompt. This is LeftAlt + the Function
keys (primarily F1-F7), yes.

On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 04:14:15PM -0000, peterzay wrote:
> Are these procedures safe on a production machine that just has to work
> at all times?

> - if logged in, log out
> - switch to VT1 with Ctrl+Alt+F1
> - log in as root (or log in as admin user and run sudo -s, if you don't have a root password)
> - run 'service gdm stop' to shut down X
> - run 'service plymouth start' to start the plymouth daemon
> - run 'plymouth splash; sleep 30; plymouth quit' as a single commandline

There is always some risk when debugging a process that works with the
kernel framebuffer (as plymouth does) that you will lock up the display or
the whole system and have to reboot to restore access. And of course you
won't be able to keep any desktop applications running if you've logged out
and stopped gdm.

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