This issue has persisted even with a completely new installation, downloaded the image yesterday, and completely wiped the SD card before.
The issue is that ArduPlane will never acquire a GPS lock. I left it for hours. The only way is to shutdown arduplane, start u-center, then wait a few minutes, then restart arduplane. When I do that, I then get weird compass calibration and AHRS issues and the screen shows the board rotating along its pitch axis, even when it is perfectly stable.
This occurs when I compile from source, or use the official package, autostarting with rc.local or not. Switching to arducopter or rover makes no difference.