Curses box uses wrong characters when X cannot start

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

Description of the problem:

gdm's XKeepsCrashing uses characters to draw boxes around its messages. For whatever reason, these characters look like gobbldegook on a clean ubuntu Breezy install (perhaps the font encoding has changed and XKeepsCrashing has not been updated?).

Steps to reproduce:
1. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change your "Device" driver to have a 1 on the end.
2. Restart X and wait for the "Failed to start the X server" message

Expected result:

Message to have curses box around it

Actual result:

Message has strange characters around it

Additional information

My locale is en_GB.UTF-8

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Still here in dapper (3rd March 2006).

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That works fine on my dapper installation. Could anybody makes a screenshot of the issue?

[Gary Coady (garycoady)]

I can see this on my system (LANG is en_IE.UTF-8). The characters are the ascii representation of the UTF-8 codepoints used to draw the box (│, └, etc.).
When the text is copied, and pasted into vi on another VT, the line drawing characters can be seen.
When a getty is opened on tty7, vt-is-UTF8 reports "Single-byte char mode."
Changing NUM from 6 to 8 in unicode_start and unicode_stop seems to fix the issue. Therefore, reassigning to console-tools.

[Gary Coady (garycoady)]

Rejecting in the gdm package, keeping open in console-tools.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Still here in Feisty.

Version Information:
Ubuntu Feisty (Herd 5)
console-tools 0.2.3dbs-65ubuntu3

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

[From my comments in bug 56024, which I just marked as a duplicate of this.]

This still happens in Feisty and Gutsy. 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?)

[paul fox (pgf-launchpad)]

i'm running feisty, and believe i have a simpler way of reproducing this problem. i have never, to my knowledge, changed my local/language/etc. (i'm in the US.)

boot the system. don't bother logging in to gdm.

switch directly to a console, with control-alt-F1.

log in, and run: "dialog --msgbox foo 0 0"

observe funky box-drawing characters: inverted L shapes, downarrows, etc.

run "sudo /etc/init.d/console_setup restart"

rerun the dialog command and observe that the dialog box output is now correct.

switch to the X11 vt, with alt-control-F7. don't log in.
switch back to the console screen with alt-control-F1.

observe that the dialog output (which should still be on the console) has now changed to "funky". re-run the dialog command. observe that fresh painting still produces "funky" output.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Still here in Gutsy.

Version information:
console-tools 1:0.2.3dbs-65ubuntu4

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

And not long after I posted the above than the problem appears to have gone entirely (same version of console-tools though). The box is seems be being drawn correctly so I guess a different update in the past few days has had an effect.

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Using the dialog test does not show the problem on Hardy and now BulletproofX no longer uses curses (and booting to safe mode shows a curses dialog correctly). Resolving Fix Released.