Re: alternative alphabets

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Sun, 2002-03-17 at 00:00, Charles Menzes wrote:
> The instructions seem, pretty straightforward, but I'm just not catching 
> on too quickly. Sure enough 'echo $LANG' does show that I have en_US set 
> for language variable (i am running redhat 7.1 on console). In 
> /usr/lib/locale I found ru_RU as well as what seems to be a couple 
> different variations.
> I tried doing an 'export LANG="ru_RU"' and then re-running vi, but nothing 
> seems to have changed regarding how my text is being diplayed. 

I'm not sure, but if you select ru as your language, the system *should*
switch to the right encoding.

> Am I missing a step, or is it possible that I am maybe setting the 
> variable to an incorrect variable? The only cyrillic rpm that i see on 
> redhat's website is XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-4.0.3-5.i386.rpm which 
> certainly looks as though its more geared towards X11 rather than console.
> 
> I did a quick 'rpm -qa | grep ISO' and it returned empty, so perhaps I am 
> missing some font files?

I did some more research.  For reference, there's a Cyrillic HOWTO at
http://www.io.com/help/linux/, and the Unicode HOWTO is at linuxdoc.

You can go two ways here: either set your console up for Unicode, or set
it up for Russian.

Unicode is rather easy.  On the console (*NOT* in X), type:

  unicode_start

Then take a look.  If you still get garbage, try converting the text to
Unicode (iconv -f ISO-8859-5 -t UTF-8 -o myfile.unicode myfile.cyr). 
Note that some utilities might not work well on a Unicode console; when
I played with this last, mutt would get confused about screen layout at
times until I turned off Unicode.

For Russian, you need to do something like this:

  loadkeys /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/ru.map
  setfont /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/koi-8x16
 
This will really screw up things like line-drawing characters and the
like.  It supposedly gets reset whenever switching to and from X.

With a little more work, you could set up one of your VTs in Russian and
one in Unicode, for when you have to work on this stuff.  Check the
Unicode HOWTO, the documentation for the console-tools package, and the
manpages for setfont, loadkeys, and mapscrn.


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