"Urgent" text is poorly readable due to low contrast (blue on black)

[Andriy]

Binary package hint: base-installer

The status text on the "Check CD for defects" page is dark blue on black background. It is difficult to read.

Steps to reproduce:
1) boot from CD
2) choose "Check CD for defects" installer menu item
3) as the check runs it prints blue messages on the black rectangle in the middle of the screen. The initial text is "Checking integrity. This may take some time"

I used current CD image from 2006-10-05

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This appears to be fixed, on powerpc at least; waiting for confirmation on i386.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Apparently this is still dark-blue-on-black on i386 (svgalib frontend).

[lexual (lexhider)]

Same issue at end of install with edgy daily cd amd64 kubuntu 25-Oct.
At the end where the cd is ejected and text to the effect of:
"please take out cd, close try, and hit ENTER".

Is almost impossible to read due to dark blue text on black background.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

This is still an issue, and has broader impact than just the integrity check. The text from casper which asks the user to eject the CD has the same issue, and the installation process won't complete until the user acknowledges it.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Assigning Dennis since I understand from IRC that he's working on this.

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

Patches are available, waiting for a core-dev to upload.

[Tollef Fog Heen (tfheen)]

Bringing milestone forward

[Dennis Kaarsemaker (dennis)]

It was fixed with the latest uploads of the standard themes.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

The text is still a low-contrast blue on black for me with the 20070411 desktop i386 RC. I'm not sure whether it's 100% saturated blue but even if it is IMO it is unsuitable.

It is possible that my anomalous colour vision is making the text more difficult to read for me than for other people but since the anomaly is in my red receptors this seems an unlikely explanation.

[Martijn vdS (martijn)]

This problem is also very visible with the "Press enter to reboot after you've removed your CD from the drive" message at the end of the xubuntu installation.

[Boris Dušek (dusek)]

Ooops, I hit the button "Also needs fixing here" to look where it needs to fix, and did not realize from the text that it makes a change to bugzilla instead of bringing me to that page I wanted to see, sorry for any inconvenience.

[David Balažic (xerces8)]

Gutsy Tribe5 x86

Still same.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

This problem is still present in gutsy d-i i386 20071009.1. It affects the encrypted LVM password prompt too, which is IMO a serious useability issue for this feature.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Bumping to final, but this really needs to get done; it bites too many different things.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

usplash-theme-ubuntu has a reasonable palette index (a bright orange), and changing it to various numbers only randomly causes the text to be blue or invisible.

This does not happen on powerpc, where the bogl backend is used (amd64 and i386 use the libsvga backend). So while we could still ponder changing the Ubuntu theme to a brighter color, the real bug is in usplash's svga backend.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

usplash is using svgalib to setup a 16-bit mode, and then passing (bogus) palette entries instead of 16-bit RGB values.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Got it, doing some final tests now.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Uploaded, waiting in the queue for review.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

usplash (0.5.7) gutsy; urgency=low

  * usplash_svga.c, usplash_svga_text(): When running in 16bpp mode,
    calling gl_setpixel() (which takes a palette index) does not make sense,
    since we never set a palette (this happens only in 8bpp modes). Use
    gl_setpixelrgb() in 16bpp mode and look up the RGB values from
    vesa_palette, which is initialized from the theme.

    This repairs operation on i386 and amd4 where SGVA is used, so that text
    appears in the color set by the theme, instead of being fixed to dark blue.
    (LP: #64408)

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:22:21 +0200

[Tonic Artos (tonic)]

The colour for the background is still a 16-bit rgb value. It should be changed to the same behaviour as the text colours.

I've been using 16-bit colours to get the text right for the fluxbuntu and ubuntustudio usplash themes. Was a bit surprised when it broke. Makes sense if PPC is still on bogl though.