Greek UTF-8 console problems

Bug #9487 reported by Dimos Dimoulis
6
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
debian-installer (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Medium
Colin Watson

Bug Description

The installer configures the locale for greek language as el_GR.UTF-8 instead of
el_GR.ISO8859-7. The console is not prepared for this during 2nd part of installation
(base-config), messages are unreadable and installation cannot be completed.
Workaround: install with US locale, change it later.

Since you don't support UTF-8 yet, you should make sure that no language is installed
as UTF-8 by default.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

This is strange, because I tested this myself on all three architectures and
I've had explicit success reports for Greek:

<markos_> Kamion: congrats on Ubuntu, I'm getting very good comments from users
here, and Greek seems to be working out of the box :-)

Can you give me more details about your system? It's also not true that we don't
support UTF-8 yet, merely that we're still aware of some bugs in console
programs and so haven't yet chosen to make it the default for all languages.

Revision history for this message
Dimos Dimoulis (dimosd) wrote :

I have had the same problem in both preview and final releases. The only thing I
have to note about the installation is that both times I did an "expert"
install. I will try a normal install and let you know how it went.

Revision history for this message
Dimos Dimoulis (dimosd) wrote :

Selecting greek locale in the installer had the following results:
- The system booted in text mode, the correct font was loaded, termwrap started
vga16fb (which wasn't needed anyway) but didn't (re)load the correct font. I
tried "consolechars -f iso07.f16 --tty=/dev/tty1" in another vc and the text
appeared correctly from then on in base-config.
- X failed to start, because: Option UseFBDev "true" was added in Section
"Device" (Identifier "NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440SE AGP 8x]") and
it couldn't find /dev/fb1 .. 9

I added "vga=0x303" in kernel parameters, to start VESA fb before termwrap,
prevent it from starting vga16fb and have the font loaded by init scripts
-after- starting the fb. This solved the above problems.

In summary: VESA fb at boot time worked, termwrap starting vga16fb by itself didn't.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

Could you try the first Hoary test CD and report on whether it fixes your
problems? Look for "Subject: Array CD 1" in the ubuntu-users list archives.

Revision history for this message
Dimos Dimoulis (dimosd) wrote :

I tried Array-1 and this time I could read the messages of 2nd part of
installation. There were other problems (some packages failed to install, X
didn't start and it probably wasn't configured/fully installed because of
dependency problems) but that's probably irrelevant.

I think you can close this bug.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

Thanks for retesting! Closing.

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