Bugzilla – Bug 153190
after the change of keymap to cs lacalized characters are not shown
Last modified: 2006-04-03 13:14:12 UTC
I changed a keymap with loadkeys cs in konsole. But when I write special characters: ěščřžýáíé nothing appears. After enter bash complains : command not found. So the characters are written but only not shown.
Ladislav: Does `setxkbmap cs' work for you? AFAIK loadkeys does not really work for X11 ;)
Actualy no. Not in console. I'm trying to change keyboard in console not within X. Btw. within X setxkbmap cs loads incorrect layout. I saw cyrilic characters. Not latin characters. setxkbmap sk loaded correct layout.
*** Bug 153179 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Juergen: Is `loadkeys' supposed to work with X11?
I'm talking about console not about X11. The black screen if you press ctrl+alt+F1.
I'll reassign it to Juergen.
/bin/loadkeys comes from the kbd package. It has no interaction with X11. This bug is not about X11 afaik. It is about console. The problem here is that we have two distinct features of the console that need to be adressed seperatly: a) which fonts are used on the screen. b) which keycodes are mapped on the keyboard. loadkeys addresses b) only. You need to use /bin/setfont to address a). Have a look at /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/ and see if you recognize a usable font there. Unfortunatly names like 'cs' or 'sk' do not work here. Does that help?
Suitable font is lat2-16. Of course in english installation is font set to latin1, which is unlikely unusable. I'd be happy if the lat2-16 font could be set as default font for console if user selects Slovak language in installation. It works if czech language is selected during instalation. But this is probably task for yast team.
Do you want to reassign? I'll close as invalid otherwise, because I don't see what kbd improvement could help here.
I agree with you. Jiri, could you solve this problem, please? The point is in comment #8.
YaST sets this font for both czech and slovak (see CONSOLE_FONT in /etc/sysconfig/console). If it doesn't work with these settings, the problem is not in yast.
I have to perform slovak installation and I'll tell you in Monday. Btw. In english default language instalation is CONSOLE_FONT="lat9w-16.psfu" which doesn't show czech or slovak characters correctly in console. I suggest to change it to some other font, which can show cz_sk characters and won't break anythig else.
Mike, could you comment the proposal?
When I changed the language in Yast to Slovak and then just for sure to the Czech language, the font is still the same: CONSOLE_FONT="lat9w-16.psfu". I have also checked the option: Adapt Keyboard Layout to $LANGUAGE. On other mashine, which owner performed installation in czech language, it has the correct font: CONSOLE_FONT="lat2-16.psfu". (Also SL Beta 8).
Hm, I'll test it. Meanwhile, setting NEEDINFO for Mike regarding the default font.
Created attachment 75946 [details] patch for /usr/share/YaST2/clients/language.ycp Ladislav, could you try this patch for /usr/share/YaST2/clients/language.ycp?
Your patch works.
Ladislav> Btw. In english default language instalation is Ladislav> CONSOLE_FONT="lat9w-16.psfu" which doesn't show czech or Ladislav> slovak characters correctly in console. I suggest to change Ladislav> it to some other font, which can show cz_sk characters and Ladislav> won't break anythig else. That's not so easy. The font support on the console is very limited. More than 512 glyphs in one font are not possible. And even fonts with 512 glyphs cannot be used by default because it makes bold face impossible. Some years ago (When we switched to using UTF-8 as the default for SuSE Linux), we tried to use the font /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/LatArCyrHeb-16.psfu.gz as the default font. This is a font with 512 glyphs which looks not too bad and supports all European languages based on the Latin alphabet and on top of that also Arabic, Cyrillic and Hebrew. I.e. this is a font which covers as many languages as currently possible on the Linux console. Unfortunately with this font using bold face became impossible which was a severe usability problem for the ncurses interface of YaST. Therefore we could not use that font as the default, we had to go back to fonts containing only 256 glyphs in one font. Having only 256 glyphs available makes it difficult to support many languages on the console at the same time. I don't know any font which is really better than "lat9w-16.ps" for a default English installation.
Thank you for comprehensive information. I am satisfied if the font is suitable for the national locales, which fixes the patch in comment #16.
Fixed (with the patch from comment #16) in yast2-country-2.13.20.