Arch Linux

JonnyLinux

Member

Registered: 2020-03-05

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Illegible font when de-crypting drive

Greetings, I have finally taken the plunge into Arch after a long slow transition over the years through, Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, and finally I am here.

It was a long time of gaining experience, learning many things along the way, breaking dozens if not hundreds of installs.

Just yesterday I got my fist Arch install up and running on an ancient HP Compaq.

Xfce4, lightdm, all good except one thing, if anyone can help point me in the right direction.

I have encrypted the / partition and everything works like a charm, with the small exception when the screen comes up to decrypt the drive it is completely illegible.
It almost looks like white glitchy blobs.

It allows me to type the password, it opens the encrypted drive and then like magic it becomes legible.

For all intents and purposes it works this way, infact, it might even be added security, because the laptop looks broken at boot, but it is bothering me.

Could someone please give me some suggestions where to look?

Last edited by JonnyLinux (2020-03-06 14:35:28)

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,708

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Illegible font when de-crypting drive

I am uncertain as to what causes this issue, but I have experienced it myself on certain digital signage systems in our company. It turned out, that this happened if and only if the system was booted in legacy BIOS mode. If it is booted in EFI mode, this issue does not occur on our particular systems. It might be connected to console mode switching of the kernel, but this is just a shot in the dark. I did not investigate this issue further, since we already planned on migrating to EFI boot, which solved this issue. If this is an option in your case, you might want to consider it. However this would just be circumnavigating the problem rather than solving it.

Last edited by schard (2020-03-05 18:06:09)

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JonnyLinux

Member

Registered: 2020-03-05

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Illegible font when de-crypting drive

I am uncertain as to what causes this issue, but I have experienced it myself on certain digital signage systems in our company. It turned out, that this happened if and only if the system was booted in legacy BIOS mode. If it is booted in EFI mode, this issue does not occur on our particular systems. It might be connected to console mode switching of the kernel, but this is just a shot in the dark. I did not investigate this issue further, since we already planned on migrating to EFI boot, which solved this issue. If this is an option in your case, you might want to consider it. However this would just be circumnavigating the problem rather than solving it.

Solution: I switched the gfxpayload in Grub to "text"
It seems something prevents graphics loading until the drive is decryprted. I dont know if there is a better solution that would allow Grub to show the correct resolution when typing the encryption passphrase, I think there is but I couldnt figure it out. At least you can read the screen now.

---------------

Thank you so much for your reply, I am reassured to learn at least someone has encountered this before and it isn't necessarily a disaster of my own creation.

I have done a little reading this afternoon, and I am suspecting it might have something to do with Grub, perhaps fiddling with gfxmode and/or gfxpayload might help?

Last edited by JonnyLinux (2020-03-06 14:39:37)