It would probably be helpful if I explained what I'm planning to do
here.

Firstly, the immediate problem is that console-setup hasn't been
upstartified and is no longer being run it in the initramfs in the
majority of installations (although systems with cryptsetup are a
notable exception).  This means that its init scripts are set up such
that they try to run while plymouth is running.  Setting the keymap
breaks in this case because plymouth is in raw mode, and setting the
font breaks because the console is in graphics mode.

I am addressing this by converting console-setup to an upstart job; it
turns out that it was already taking some care to save ACMs and fonts to
/etc/ for early use, so having two separate tasks at different points in
the boot sequence doesn't seem necessary any more.  This solution isn't
perfectly correct because setting the font races with X startup, but if
we use 'starting on plymouth-splash' (etc.) then I think we'll generally
get away with it until we have better options.


Secondly, the reason I've taken a while to do anything about this bug is
that I wanted to take the opportunity to do something about one of the
kernel limitations alluded to above, namely that it's not possible to
set the font on a graphics-mode console.  This isn't fundamentally
impossible - you can save the font and program it later upon switching
to text mode - but unfortunately nobody ever successfully managed to
tell vgacon that, so the ioctls are restricted to stop people breaking
things with them.  I've been working on extending vgacon so that this
restriction no longer needs to exist.  See this post for more
information:

  https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2010-March/009198.html

I think we can probably get away without such a kernel change for Lucid,
but this is something like the third or fourth time I've fixed this type
of bug, and I'm getting fed up with it, so I wanted to spend some time
removing the limitation so that this whole system is less fragile.

-- 
20100219 Server ISO, 20100224.1 desktop ISO fails to set up console keyboard 
correctly
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/524439
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