When booting from CD-ROM, if text mode installation is chosen and Russian language is selected, then all screen messages appear as garbage. Apparently the console fonts are not loaded (Cyr_a8x16 in the file /etc/fonts.cgz in initrd.img). This problem does not occur when booting from diskette with bootnet.img. This problem also existed in RedHat 6.1.
*** Bug 9523 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Fixed in internal build.
The original bug was fixed, but Russian text installation still produces garbage. Now at least the installer works consistently -- booting from diskette also produces garbage (booting from diskette worked before this "fix"). The existence of this problem can easily be verified by booting Rawhide of Feb 28 in text mode from CD or diskette and selecting Russian as the installation language. The problem now is that a Cyrillic font is loaded (Cyr_a8x16), but the screenmap (ACM) does not work. The font that is loaded is in Alternative encoding, but the text is written in KOI-8. If there are any questions about this problem, feel free to mail me.
This problem can be easily fixed by replacing the Cyrillic font file (Cyr_a8x16) in the /etc/fonts.cgz archive in initrd.img on the boot diskette. This file was correct in the Red Hat 6.1 distribution, but has a broken ACM map in the newest Rawhide.