Unicode Console?

[Yuri Pankov]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 07:28:52PM -0600, Kevin Monceaux wrote:
> Fellow FreeBSD Fans,
>
> I've been running FreeBSD on a web/mail server, which I only have remote 
> access to, for a while now.  At home I've been running Linux since the 1.xx 
> kernel days but am considering switching my desktop box to FreeBSD.
>
> I never given much thought to my locale setting until recently.  I'm about 
> to start participating in an online Spanish study group, via e-mail, and 
> might also be following along with an Old English study group.  I'm an old 
> fashioned kinda user and prefer to do as much as I can via the text 
> console.  I compose/read e-mail via Alpine.  After some trial and error I 
> finally convinced my Linux box, currently running Arch Linux, to handle all 
> of the "special" characters I need via the console.  In the end, it 
> amounted to:
>
> 1.  Add "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" to /etc/locale.gen
>
> 2.  run locale-gen
>
> 3.  set LANG to en_US.UTF-8
>
> 4.  Switch to a font that contains the symbols I need.  I'm currently
>     using one of the Terminus console fonts.  For some reason I had to
>     switch to a framebuffer console otherwise after executing
>     unicode_start the font was way too dim.
>
> 5.  run unicode_start(added to my .cshrc file)
>
> After the above I'm able to display various accented characters such as á, 
> é, ì, ö, û, ç, etc. along with the Spanish ñ, inverted punctuation 
> marks ¡, ¿, Old English thorn(þ), eth(ð), ash(æ), etc.  Also, from 
> reading mail from various mailing lists I've noticed that it also handles 
> the Cyrillic alphabet and part of the Greek alphabet.
>
> From what I've seen of FreeBSD I'd expect it to have console capabilities 
> that are superior to those of Linux.  But, I haven't managed to figure out 
> how to achieve similar functionality via the FreeBSD text consoles.  I'm 
> currently testing FreeBSD(7.0-RC2) under VMware.  Can anyone point me in 
> the right direction?
>
>
>
>
> Kevin
> http://www.RawFedDogs.net
> http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
> Bruceville, TX
>
> Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
> Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!

Unicode isn't supported in syscons at all (AFAIK). Check
http://opal.com/jr/freebsd/unicode/ for more complete overview.


HTH,
Yuri