The FC 0830 nightly build on ia64 (observed on Altix) seems to have problems handling arrow keys. Other keys work fine. I noticed this on the "Installation Method" screen. I tried both from a xterm and a gnome terminal (I'm using a FC 2 x86_64 box as my workstation). Jeremy asked me to try launching from an older rh box. I'll do that shortly.
fyi -if you type the first letter of the option (like H for Hard Drive or N for NFS) it does work - so that's a quick work-around in case others hit this.
Almost certainly ncurses/termcap weirdness.
I re-displayed an xterm from a RH 9 box to my workstation, and logged in from there. The arrow keys also did not work in that case.
The arrow key does "something" in the 'Choose a Language' window. English is default. When I up-arrow, it sends me to arabic. I'm guessing the screen controls are being detected as letters or something.
This is still an issue in fedora core nightly 0907. RHEL4 0906 did not have this problem.
From the comment regarding up-arrow and Arabic, it sounds as if the user (who does not mention the terminfo in use) is perhaps using the Linux console's terminfo entry, which assumes the cursor keys are already in application mode. The difference between \E[A and \EOA is enough to make the escape sequence unrecognized, and give an application an "A" - which would be recognized as the abbreviation for "Arabic".
FC nightly Oct12 and RHEL4 nightly Oct11 don't seem to suffer from this any more. I'm closing this.