hwinfo package not available-black screen during Vivid boot

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday, March 27, 2015 06:26:14 PM Felix Miata wrote:
> 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.

hwinfo was removed during Saucy development because it was broken (which is 
why Vivid's apt/aptitude don't install it.  It's not present in the packages 
file for Vivid.

Here's what's documented as the removal rationale:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hwinfo/+publishinghistory

Removal requested on 2013-09-06.
Deleted on 2013-09-06

uses deprecated and broken hal, unmaintained in Debian, obsolete, LP#1221254

Scott K