"Sheshadrivasan B" wrote on 2005-03-16 12:38 UTC: > what I actually meant was the Linux serial console (/dev/ttySxx) device not > the VGA console.
As far as the kernel is concerned, there is no difference between the serial console and the way xterm interacts with the kernel (via a pseudo terminal). The tty-driver cooked-mode issue applies to all of these. Other than that, the level of UTF-8 support is entirely up to the terminal (emulator) that you connect to your serial port. > When a terminal emulator is connected to the serial console how does the > character generation > take place: > a) Keyboard combination pressed by user generates the unique Unicode code > point for a particular character, which is received by the serial driver > which > is encoded into UTF-8 The serial driver just passes on bytes. It is ignorant on what character set is used. If you want to use UTF-8, then this both your terminal emulator and your application need to be told that UTF-8 will be used. For most Linux applications, this happens via the locale variables (LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, etc.). > b) The terminal emulator generates the UTF-8 sequence corresponding to > the character pressed by the user ? Correct. > Also, do we have keyboards that are specific to locales? Yes. Each commonly used keyboard layout was originally designed for one particular country or language group. > do all keyboards permit input of US-ASCII characters. All standard keyboards used on PCs have always been able to enter the full ASCII repertoire. It would be close to impossible to use Linux from a keyboard that does not allow you to enter all ASCII characters. (Which is the reason why ANSI C trigraphs were ridiculed so much.) > Or is it that the key-combinations are mapped to a Unicode code point by the > terminal emulator which get sent to the serial console ? There is no other commonly used way to transfer Unicode character over a VT100-style terminal serial communication than in the form of UTF-8. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
