Arch Linux

eric

Member

From: under heaven

Registered: 2004-02-11

Posts: 118

boot fails after glibc-2.4 upgrade & locale/LANG issues

Hi,

I've tried to upgrade to glibc-2.4 a few days ago (that was before glibc was moved from testing to current).

After upgrading glibc the console output of some executables crashes with a segmentation fault. The output before the crash was unreadable (not normal alfanumeric characters).
It looked like foreign characters were not displayed correctly, so I changed my LANG variable (export LANG=C) and suddenly the same executables showed normal output and didn't crash. I also found out that setting LANG to C and *_*.utf8 (ie. LANG=en_SG.utf8) did not crash these executables, but *_*.iso88591 did.

I don't mind using LANG=C, so I changed the LOCALE variable in /etc/rc.conf and reboot the system. But the boot process failed with unreadable characters (just like the executables described before). The last line that I could read was something with INIT and a version number, this line was 1 or a few lines before the normal "starting udev... done" line.

Does the system start with a locale or LANG variable that causes the boot process to fail? How can I change this? This probably happens before /etc/rc.conf is read.

I have compiled the kernel myself because I patch my own kernel. I also don't use the module loading method (initrd?) that archlinux uses since 6 months or so. At this moment I use 2.6.17 with the ck1 patch.