Hi,

/etc/rcS.d/S49console-setup is run rather late in the rcS runlevel,
leading to a visible and ugly flickering of the screen and changing of
the font during the system boot process.

I don't know if this is possible technically, but if the font and
keymap setting was moved to the initrd-phase, the whole boot process
would appear in the improved font and it would not be interrupted by
visible flickering and font changing anymore.

Best Regards,
Fabian

Am 12.06.2009 um 10:06 schrieb Fabian Greffrath:

FWIW, Ubuntu has been doing this for more than two years, according to
their changelog:

,----
| console-setup (1.13ubuntu6) feisty; urgency=low
|
|   * Set keymap and font in the initramfs if possible. Setting these as early
|     as possible is a good thing; we can't set up the font correctly once
|     usplash is running; and setting up the font between usplash and X
|     requires an ugly mode switch.
|
|  -- Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>  Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:21:24 +0000
`----

The downside is that their package depends on initramfs-tools which
would probably not be desirable for Debian.

Sven

Sven Joachim schrieb:

The ubuntu changelog tells "Set keymap and font in the initramfs if
possible.". The phrase "if possible" sounds like this feature will
simply be unavailable if the appropriate initrd tool package isn't
found, so console-setup wouldn't have to depend on this package (but
maybe suggest it instead).

it seems like #532852 (Please run console-setup during initrd phase)
would also affect systems with a crypted root.

that is, entering the passphrase to unlock the block device backing the
root filesystem could be done with the machine's "preferred" keymap,
instead of with whatever default appears.

[I am sending CC also to 532852@bugs.debian.org]

As far as I can understand, this bug can be fixed in two ways - by code
provided by console-setup, or by code provided by initramfs-tools.

Almost all of the code required in order to fix this bug has been
implemented in console-setup for quite some time. Unfortunately there
are two problems:

1. I (as one of the maintainers of console-setup) can not guarantee
that I will be able to maintain this code in future.  Not because this
will be too complex or too time consuming (no, it won't be...), but
rather because I don't feel myself wanting to keep myself updated with
any future changes in the initrd build process.

2. I suppose the maintainers of initramfs-tools can say something
analogous...

I am willing to provide any required development, education, whatever,
the moment there appears a developer willing to maintain this.

Anton Zinoviev