Hello, Attached is the updated "console" bootscript with support for both UTF-8 and traditional 8-bit modes. 8-bit mode is the default. Documentation is below, please ask questions if it is not clear enough. If you think you can improve readability of the script, please do.
With this script, the "-I '\033\(K'" option in /etc/inittab for agetty is no longer needed. Don't forget to set LANG and LC_ALL properly in /etc/profile. My previous experiments with dev.d handlers are considered failed because that handler is called too late and /etc/issue is displayed improperly if it contains national characters. Distros sometimes make the console setup a part of /etc/profile, I decided not to do that for now since if all users have the same preferred console settings, the bootscript does its job. This script reads the configuration file, /etc/sysconfig/console. This file should contain lines of the form: VARIABLE="value". The following variables are recognized: FONT: the arguments you want to pass to the "setfont" program. If not set, the "setfont" program is not called. KEYMAP: the arguments you want to pass to the "loadkeys" program. Typically this is the name of the keymap, e.g. "ru-ms". If this variable is not set, the "loadkeys" program is not called. If you want to take the composition rules only from the keymap, without merging them with the kernel default rules, prepend "-c", as in KEYMAP="-c es euro2" (not sure that "es" is a good example here, I just wanted to demonstrate the ability to specify arbitrary loadkeys command line parameters). KEYMAP_CORRECTIONS: some stock keymaps are not perfect. In such case, create a file with corrections to that keymap, store it somewhere in /etc/kbd, and set this variable to its full path. The "loadkeys" program will be called with that filename as an argument. The book already contains a KEYMAP_CORRECTIONS="/etc/kbd/bs-sends-del" example. If you don't need any corrections, don't set this variable. (i.e. if you have a working /etc/sysconfig/console file from LFS 6.0, it will still work). In addition, the following variables are useful only in UTF-8 mode: UNICODE: set this variable to "1", "yes" or "true" to activate the UTF-8 mode. If this variable is not set or set to any other value, the traditional 8-bit mode is used. LEGACY_CHARSET: most keymaps are stored on disk in 8-bit charsets, not in UTF-8, and therefore are unusable in their original form in the UTF-8 mode. The script is able to convert them to UTF-8 on the fly, but it needs to know the original charset of the keymap to do the conversion properly. That charset is typically found at the top of the keymap file in the declaration similar to: charset "iso-8859-2". In that case, set LEGACY_CHARSET="8859-2" in order to convert that keymap from iso-8859-2 to UTF-8. If this variable is not set, no conversion is done. Maybe it's better to rename that to KEYMAP_CHARSET. BROKEN_COMPOSE: By default, if the UTF-8 mode is active and this variable is unset, the script disables all dead keys and compose sequences because the vanilla kernel gives wrong results anyway (it emits valid iso-8859-1 or other 8-bit encoding instead of valid UTF-8, even in UTF-8 mode; see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=143014 and its duplicates). If you have patched the kernel according to the instructions in the script, set this variable to "false" and append "-m the_value_of_legacy_charset" to FONT to get working compose sequences. Questions that are likely to be asked: Q: why isn't this patch in the kernel? A: it's a temporary hack, not a real solution -- but it works. Q: does this kernel patch do any harm to non-UTF-8 users? A: no Q: fonts with 8-pixel height look wrong on ATI video cards A: That is ATI hardware bug. 2.4 kernels managed to avoid triggering it, though. Don't use such fonts with ATI cards. Q: where is the Chinese support? A: e.g. in the zhcon program (beyond BLFS). Chinese users don't run loadkeys and/or setfont. Q: I have set FONT to "LatArCyrHeb-16" or "drdos8x16", and the output of the bootscripts that run before "console" is turned to garbage. A: The problem is that the bootscripts use bold colors by default, and that doesn't survive transition from a 8-bit to a 9-bit font on non-framebuffer console. Use a framebuffer or replace "\\033[1;" with "\\033[0;" in the lines from "SUCCESS" to "BRACKET" in /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions. Or better, ask Nathan Coulson to create an official configuration file for that palette :) Q: is it all that has to be done in order to get working UTF-8 in LFS? A: no, one has to adjust instructions for ncurses and man (both can be made harmless for non-UTF-8 users) and to add optional --disable-nls type flags to some other packages. Also one has to mark some broken packages in BLFS. -- Alexander E. Patrakov
console
Description: application/shellscript
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