Well, xpdf if still not displaying and there are other font issues. I was debating a reinstall (ugh) because of the way things have sort of gotten out of hand with this system, but I'm going to defer that for as long as possible. In spite of the setbacks in learning to use and administrate my Linux system, I do have an occasional success. Maybe for every 3 or 4 failures I succeed in doing something I need/want to do. This note will document one such limited success.
Don't know if others recall how, a few months back I was trying to input unicode fonts into the system. Well, that attempt ended in failure, but I had another go at it recently and have gotten a bit further. This is with a Debian unstable system, so I don't know how transferable any of this will be to other distros/systems. It turns out one secret to inputting unicode in at least some X applications (can confirm it works in OpenOffice, which is important for me, and Mozilla) is to use setxkbmap. >From the command line, as root I presume, run, for example "setxkbmap ru." That maps your keyboard to standard Russian layout and, if you have fonts installed, allows inputting them in X apps like OOo. I've tried it and it works. I've succeeded to some extent with both Russian and Greek fonts in this. (caveat: you might want to enter "setxkbmap us" into the terminal to start with since, if you have no Russian or Greek terminal fonts, you will lose ability to enter input into the terminal and could have problems getting English back. If you enter that first, as I'm suggesting, you can just scroll back in your bash history to restore English) Yet another option that gives something like the keyboard switching capability Windows users can have involves editing XF86Config-4. This works for XFree86 4.3.something, but may not work for earlier releases. I found this information in the file /etc/X11/xkb/README.config. Edit the keyboard stanza in XF86Config-4 as follows (excerpt from the help file mentioned above): "Let's say you want to configure your new Logitech cordless desktop keyboard, you intend to use three different layouts at the same time - us, czech and german (in this order), and that you are used to Alt-Shift combination for switching among them. Then the configuration snippet could look like this: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Keyboard1" Driver "Keyboard" Option "XkbModel" "logicordless" Option "XkbLayout" "us,cz,de" Option "XKbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle" EndSection" I tried this and, sure enough, after restarting X, I can use alt-shift to toggle between keyboard maps/fonts in OOo (I replaced "us,cz.de" with "us,ru,el" to suit my needs). Another post at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=221053 even describes an additional entry to make the scroll lock LED light up when the non-native input method is selected. Given that I've gotten this far, why do I speak of "limited success"? Here's why. I need a Greek keyboard map that allows inputting of diacritical marks, and I'm beginning to doubt that such an animal exists. If you know of one, please do let me know. Another hang-up, though one likely a bit easier to address, is the Russian keyboard map that ru respresents: it's the traditional Russian typewriter layout, and I need a phonetic one. It seems ru_yawerty is what I need, but I can't succeed in loading it so far. But I have some ideas, as follows. In the directory /etc/X11/xkb/symbols there are whole lot of what appear to be keyboard maps listed - ru_yawerty among them. When I try to load it, I get no errors in the terminal I run setxkbmap from, so it seems to work. But no Russian font appears when I type. If I do ctrl-alt-F1 and look at (I guess) stdout, I see something like "couldn't load pc/ru_yawerty." I see a pc directory under the symbol directory mentioned above, and there is, in fact, no ru_yawerty in it. My keyboard is registered in XF86Config-4 as pc104. So, maybe all I have to do is copy ru_yawerty into that /etc/X11/xkb/symbol/pc directory and it will load? What do you think? Furthermore, if it does seem like this will work, why isn't that keyboard map in the pc directory to begin with? Help will be appreciated. If I can get the phonetic keyboard layout for Russian part of my unicode input problem will be solved - at least for now. I fear the Greek diacriticals problem will be insurmountable at the present stage of development though. Thanks, James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
