Comment 2 for bug 130444

UPDATE Another possible clue? -- Context is Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. This was discovered accidentally. When the grub boot starts, just after the Ubuntu logo appears on the screen but before the sign-in box comes up, I do ctrl-alt-F1 and switch to TTY display (with all the messages that are usually hidden at boot time). After a few seconds the normal character set changes to a slightly uglier one -- looking like something circa 1980 -- and a little while later the display returns by itself to gui mode and I can sign in as usual, as if I had never left the gui terminal.

Now I return to a TTY virtual terminal with the slightly primitive character set, and lo! *all the accents appear in their proper places*. There are a few minor discrepancies, the only major one being that é appears as £, but believe me I am much, much happier with the "new" arrangement; and Midnight Commander now shows up with proper borders. If I write a file in TTY and then read it in gui, the £ will show as é.

Three more points: (1) all virtual terminals are affected the same way; (2) the caps lock now works; (3) the output of stty -a is the same with this "new" arrangement as it was with the standard arrangement.

I must add I am somewhat disconcerted that the importance of this bug has not yet been determined. Even if VTs are used only for writing code, there are some people who might occasionally write comments in languages other than English (a peculiar Indo-European dialect which tries to dispense with accents). Also any display that requires borders, such as Midnight Commander, looked terrible on the standard VT arrangement; with my accidentally found "fix" I can now enjoy it in its former beauty.