Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 84788
rc.sysconfig console font loading bug
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:34:39 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030204 Description of problem: rc.sysconfig init virtual consoles before loading console font. It causes the system font loads the first virtual console only. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. configure system font via /etc/sysconfig/i18n 2. reboot you machine Actual Results: The configured font appears on the first virtual console only Expected Results: The configured font appears on _all_ virtual console only Additional info: Here is the fixed part of rc.sysconfig file: # Load system font if [ -x /sbin/setsysfont ]; then [ -f /etc/sysconfig/i18n ] && . /etc/sysconfig/i18n case "$LANG" in *.utf8*|*.UTF-8*) action $"Setting default font ($SYSFONT): " /bin/unicode_start $SYSFONT ;; *) action $"Setting default font ($SYSFONT): " /sbin/setsysfont ;; esac for i in 2 3 4 5 6; do > /dev/tty$i done fi
The font (and UTF-8 mode) is set again *after* you log in to the VT. Every time you log out, console gets reset to the initial state. That's not to say it is not a problem: E.g. log out, press Ctrl-Alt-DEL. The initscripts messages output when switching to runlevel 6 will be garbled if the locale uses non-ASCII chars, because the console is not in UTF-8 mode (I don't know whether the font is loaded). The right way to fix this would really be making sure that the VTs are in the desired mode *all the time*, not only when a user is logged on them. I'm not sure how easily this can be done though.
In response to the initial bug - no, you need to init the console *before* you load the font for it to work right. This is a hack workaround; I'm fairly sure this is a kernel bug that the font but not the mapping table are inherited on VC creation.