Description of problem: - Power on the PC - Choose to start Fedora on the GRUB menu - An instant before the kernel starts up, garbage characters will flash on the screen See attached video. This happens with grub2-0.26.beta4.fc17, but I've seen it for a while.
Created attachment 585300 [details] video of the problem
I haven't seen that on other machines - it might depend on the hardware. beta4 is however 'old', and beta5 will have the necessary fonts and will thus use graphical mode - that will probably make a difference. Please try beta5 and run grub2-install and grub2-mkconfig. (Remove any theme settings from /etc/default/grub first to match the behaviour in the final f17.)
Thanks for the quick reply; actually I realized that even though I had the beta4 package installed, the actual boot loader on disk was still the beta2 version (I guess we don't update the actual installed boot loader on every grub2 update?). Updating it (i.e. reissuing grub2-install) to either the beta4 or beta5 packages fix the bug for me. Should we update the boot loader on disk together with the grub2 package?
Fedora has traditionally considered boot loader installation a major task that shouldn't be done automatically on package update. One reason is that it isn't stored anywhere what the grub2-install target(s) where. The bootloader will however usually be reinstalled by anaconda when a version upgrade is made.