I have installed and reinstalled ASL several times onto a ESXi VM and I keep getting wierd console behavior. Command completion doesn't work, the arrow keys print control characters instead of moving the cursor left and right, and vim is totally unusable because key mappings act all wierd. However, none of this behavior appears while connected through an SSH session. Changing shells doesn't seem to affect anything. Re-compiling vmware-tools doesn't help. I'm at my wits end! My environment is Centos 6.1 on ESXi 5.0. The Centos is a fresh install.

Any ideas?

Not really anything that would help here, but I get the exact same thing with CentOS 6 in vmware workstation 8. And thats without ASL installed, scientific linux and rhel 6 seem to be fine though.

Yep, I get the same thing without ASL installed. Fresh Centos 6.1 and 6.2. Sounds like a bug in vmware.

Interesting. It didn't start happening on ESXi 5 until the ASL kernel was booted. I will try with RHEL 6 and observe its behavior.

i just installed ESXi5 and CentOS6.1, updated everything and i see the same thing in console. i used the tools from http://www.vmware.com/download/packages.html

same thing here.. console is messed up but, ssh session is normal.

Yup, like I said I see the same thing with or without ASL in vmware workstation 8. So thinking its a tty-ish type issue with centos (since this doesnt happen in SL6 or RHEL6) I converted it to a KVM image and guess what? It goes away... Just a guess, but perhaps there is some kind of termcap mismatch going on with the vmware console and regular vga or serial output.

hmm... same behavior occurs with RHEL6, but only after the ASL kernel is booted. RHEL 6.2 inside ESXi 5.0
After initial install of RHEL6 everything is fine at the console.

With ASL installed on RHEL6.2 as a guest VM, I booted back into the stock kernel and the problem disappears. Boot into the ASL kernel and it comes back.

What makes you sure that it's a VMware bug?

Also, I'm not seeing the same behavior after installing a fresh Centos 6.1 minimal inside VMWare Workstation 8.0.1 build 528992.

Is there a difference when you use the secure kernel, as opposed to the insecure default kernel in centos?

By difference, I assume you mean configuration difference.

Answer: No, not that I'm aware of. It's just stock kernel vs. ASL kernel. When I get to the Grub boot screen and select the stock kernel (2.6.32-220.el6.x86_64) the console behavior disappears. I go back to the ASL kernel (2.6.32.43-6.art.x86_64) and the issue returns. (BTW, I'm talking about RHEL6.2 now because I switched after seeing the behavior in Centos.)

I did try the ASL kernel (kernel-2.6.32.48-10.art.x86_64.rpm) from asl-3.0-testing, but no luck. Still the same behavior.

You say that you see the console behavior without ASL installed in a VM running within Workstation 8. What specific VM settings did you use in Workstation 8? I'm not seeing any issues at the console after a fresh Centos 6.1-minimal install?

I dont do minimal installs, and I see it. So maybe its something different between a Web server option install, and a minimal? This is without ASL installed (so default Centos kernel).

+1 I'm seeing this too in Centos 6 vSphere 4.1. Just spent a couple hours googling around and trying different vmware config files. Any fixes in the works? I didn't see any workarounds, please let me know if I missed something. One other really strange artifact that I noticed: when I login using user/pass to the console, my password appears on screen in plain text. Seems like that shouldn't happen. None of this behavior happens in SSH, just vmware console.