18.9 Garbled Login Prompt
This may be due to using the wrong character set, transmission errors due to too high of a baud rate, incompatible baud rates, incompatible parity, or the wrong number of bits per byte. If it's a variety of strange characters you have the wrong character set or a high order bit is being set by mistake. If words are misspelled, try a lower baud rate. For baud, parity, or bits/character incompatibilities you see a lot of the same "error character" which represents a real character that can't be displayed correctly due to an error in parity or baud rate. The "error character" may be an upside-down question mark or some other strange looking character such as a rectangle.
If you are using agetty (often just named getty), the agetty program will detect and set parity and/or bits/character if you type something. Try it with a return to see if it fixes it.
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