Comment 2 for bug 695658

I am able to reproduce this bug (and the workaround) on Natty Server (installed from the Alpha 1 Server Install CD). Since Ubuntu Server is configured by default to write status information to tty7, it looks a little different -- you see a "shadow" of whatever text is written there.

Arguably the unreadability of that text could be considered an additional bug, but I don't think so. Switching to any other virtual terminal and back renders the text readable again (because it gets rid of the purple color scheme, just as on an Ubuntu non-server command-line system). When the workaround is applied, text on tty7 is always readable.

On the other hand, a minority of server administrators might prefer to see those status messages (instead of a login screen) when they boot up their servers. Assuming they haven't installed X11 (or have, but have it configured not to provide a graphical login screen), they could achieve this by manually adding vt.handoff=7 to the grub2 configuration...except that this would show the purple and black silhouetted text, instead of readable text. That's the justification for the idea that the displaying of unreadable solid black-on-purple text might be an additional bug.