Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 243912
system font needs to be restored upon shutdown
Last modified: 2009-03-11 12:53:04 EDT
Description of problem: Note: This is a reopen of bug 82258 for RHEL 4 (actually tested on CentOS 4, but the initscripts package is quite the same -- the CentOS modifications are minimal and should cause no difference in this regard). Much of the following info is copied from the bug 82258 with minor updates. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 7.93.29.EL-1 (actually 7.93.29.EL-1.centos4) How reproducible: When shutting down the correct sysfont doesn't get set until portmapper is run. It would be nice if the sysfont could get set at the beginning of the shutdown. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use another language than English (I used cs_CZ.UTF-8 and cs_CZ.ISO-8859-2) 2. Shutdown 3. Check out the strange UTF8 characters Actual results: The localized strings containing natinal characters are displayed incorrectly. (They get fixed when the `lang.sh' is run via the `portmapper' sysinit script as already noted above.) The console also seems to have lost its unicode mode as the multibyte characters show as a single character per byte. Expected results: The national characters should show correctly since the very beginning of the shutdown sequence. Additional info: Reply to bug 82258, comment #1: The fonts (including the Unicode enable state) seem to get reset by the console reset upon logout (or perhaps by the console reinitialization when the console gets respawned?) (Btw, I use no *user* logout scripts and don't think there are any system-wide.) When the shutdown is initiated from a logged-in session (using the `reboot' command, for example), the messages are displayed correctly. Regarding other comments in the bug 82258, I don't use xdm at the moment, so can't tell anything about the influence of runlevel 5 on the console fonts. I believe, this should be related, though. A tested patch is already available and attached.
Created attachment 156813 [details] proposed fix
How are you shutting down?
Good question (read: Forgot to mention this -- sorry!). Simple Ctrl-Alt-Del does the trick. ;-) Considering the specifics of the bug it should also "work" whe nthe shutdown is initiated using other means than console (e. g. via SSH). But it's not so typical to be able to watch the console display in this case.
That's from a virtual terminal, correct?
Yeah. But in order to prevent any misunderstanding: If you mean the same thing that's also called virtual console, lives in `/dev/tty[0-9]' and displays through the video card, then yes.
Apologies for the delay in response. At this stage in the lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, with the goal of mantaining stability and consistency for our custormers, we are only adding critical bugfixes and security fixes; this issue would not qualify under those criteria. Hence, marking this as WONTFIX for RHEL 4. Again, apologies for the inconvenience.