console (before X) fonts unreadable

[Peter Schüller]

since the upgrade to natty, my console fonts are completely unreadable, it looks like the amount of black and white pixels is the same but they have randomly moved around in each character

this happens before X has started the first time, and after switching from X back to console

logging in and executing commands works - but you cannot read anything and must exactly know what you want to type

(this is especially a problem if your X was broken too by the upgrade and you try to fix your X using the non-decipherable console)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: console-setup 1.57ubuntu20
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Jul 12 23:14:05 2011
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: console-setup
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-07-09 (2 days ago)

[Peter Schüller (schueller-p)]

maybe this is related to grub config?

[Peter Schüller (schueller-p)]

I got my text console back by commenting out the following lines in /etc/grub.d/10_linux and running update-grub2

#cat << EOF
# set gfxpayload=\$linux_gfx_mode
#EOF

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[taj (othertaj)]

The same happened after I installed an nvidia GeForce FX5500 graphics board (I had VGA, but I needed DVI)
Running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with older nvidia-173 driver