current selection not obvious since menu colors changed

[Mikel Ward]

The boot loader selection screen used white text on a black background with the Ubuntu logo, and the entire line for the current selection was in inverse (i.e. black text on a white background). About a month ago, this changed, and now there is only a white cursor on the far right.

This makes it too hard to see which item is selected, especially as the description is on the left and the cursor is away from it on the far right.

Please bring back the old behavior.

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

My /boot/grub/menu.lst has the color directive disabled, so we're talking about the default behavior.

Setting it to
    color white/black black/white
should be usable as a workaround.

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

I had to disable the background ("splash image") to get black on white (the highlight color is not honored when splashimage is also specified).

I guess this is a bug in grub.

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

Filed upstream in GNU Savannah as bug 16190 (https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=16190).

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

Support for splashimages is added by a Red Hat/Debian patch.

In graphics_init() in graphics.c in debian/patches/graphics.diff, line 1337 has:
    /* make sure that the highlight color is set correctly */
    graphics_highlight_color = ((graphics_normal_color >> 4) |
                                ((graphics_normal_color & 0xf) << 4));

As far as I can tell, graphics_normal_color is set to A_NORMAL, which is (1UL - 1U) = 0 in /usr/include/ncurses.h, thus graphics_highlight_color is also 0.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This only happens if you upgraded through a particular broken version in Dapper. It won't happen on fresh installs of Dapper or on upgrades directly from Breezy to Dapper.

Michael, this gets asked rather frequently. Is there any way we can detect the upgrade-induced breakage and undo it?

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

Could you please attach your /boot/grub/menu.lst?I'll looking into undoing the broken splash automatically.

There is indeed a bug in grub (or rather the splash patch) as well. If you have a black background, you won't see the cursor.

Cheers,
 Michael

[Mikel Ward (mikelward)]

This is the file before I made any changes to the color, background, splashimage, etc.

splashimage is set, color is remarked, and foreground/background are nowhere to be seen.

[Martin Bergner (martin-bergner)]

 I will add mine, since it is different, I really didn't change anything in it. (as far as I can remember)

[Sami Haahtinen (ressu)]

What kind of screen are you getting this problem? I've seen similar issues on LCD displays but not on CRT.

[KarlGoetz (kgoetz)]

I have noticed what i think is this same problem when upgrading to dappers -20 kernel. The whole screen/background spash is black, and there is no indication about the line you have selected. i can attach my menu.list if needed.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This change was done by a broken version of update-grub in dapper. To fix it just delete the splashimage=
line from your /boot/grub/menu.lst.

I'll see if I can add a automatic undoing to update-grub.

[KarlGoetz (kgoetz)]

Has this been fixed? (i think it has) if so this bug could be closed.

[KarlGoetz (kgoetz)]

I think this is fixed.

[KarlGoetz (kgoetz)]

i stand corrected... this is the correct closing tag.