hwinfo package not available-black screen during Vivid boot

[Felix Miata]

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/h/hwinfo/ has the packages, though they are old. Neither apt-get nor aptitude acknowledge their existence on my
fresh minimalist HTTP en_US Vivid installation with sddm and kf5 added. Apparently something is supposed to be installed/used in its stead when various Google
hits in the forums say use hwinfo (with X not working). What package would that be?

The reason I'm asking is there is a conflict between hwinfo and monitor-edid (run from booting something else) and vbeinfo (run from Vivid's Grub2 cmdline). I
want to get both sets of info from Vivid before searching for any existing bug or considering if a new bug should be reported. No matter what I put for gfxmode
and/or gfxpayload on Vivid's Grub2 kernel cmdline (editing at runtime), I get nothing on screen from the time between Grub menu and Greeter, unless instead of
either or both I use video=1440x900 at 60. This is the same problem reported by the 2nd poster on http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1474799 five years ago,
which was never resolved for any of its participants.

Also FWIW, running MC on any of the ttys, the charset used is wrong, so the single box characters are drawn using multiple other characters, making a mess of
screen output not only normally, but extra when MC popups should be clearing.
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