Hi all. It's me, Elvis.
I'm living in Greece... just bought my first PC, el-cheapo, from Multirama, no OS, for 300 Euros. Installed the following versions of Linux: /dev/hda1 - Debian 3.0 /dev/hda2 - Swap /dev/hda3 - SuSE 9.0 /dev/hda4 - Red Hat 7.1 All work, more or less, but SuSE is the best... To get the Greek keyboard layout (and display) to work I put export LANG=el_GR.UTF-8 into my .profile. The installation procedure, Yast, was no help, so I did it by hand. (I assume this is how you get a UTF-8 environment, in an X environment, anyway.) The keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+K, switches between mappings, but stops at the last one, and does not rotate to the first, so I have to click the little icon with the mouse to change maps. Any ideas what's going on? KDE is no help. KDE says I can set a "locale", and accepts input, but does nothing... On the Debian (but not the SuSE), I can select from a list of "character sets" but "unicode" is not one of them, just the old ISO8859s and some strange looking beasts, like an ISO 696969something, sign of the devil... but no unicode, or utf-8. What's going on with Debian and Red Hat? What happened to .profile? What is all this bash stuff? The keymap shortcut works correctly, but I can't get my login shell to read a .profile, so I don't know how to set the locale. Both OSes display question marks of boxes instead of greek letters. I have no idea what they're doing. Is there a rational way to approach the problem of using unicode on a Linux computer? I mean, do I have to fiddle with the thing forever? [None of the Linuces recognize my graphics card, the el-cheapo, a SiS 660, I think, but the VESA framebuffer seems to work fine, and the Winmodem, of course, is dead in the water. Only SuSE does anything reasonable with my sound card, another el-cheapo, I don't know what.] My goal was to install Linux on the most basic machine I could find. Any advice? Yudit would be a good idea if it worked as a console mode (=non X) application, like vi, but on a virtual terminal, not in an xterm. I had good success with Unipad on Windows 98, which had very bad unicode support, because the editor supplied all the keymaps, and a couple simple unicode fonts, even for poly greek, in a user-feindlich environment. It, like Windows seems to igonre the notion of 'locale'. Am I missing something? What's the point, if X already provides the internationalization support, but the vcs don't? Please, any suggestions? Elvis PS Windows XP seems to work nicely with unicode... They've even made Notepad into a utf-8 editor, easy to use, as it should be. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
