Choosing appropriate keymaps and fonts

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Matthew Burgess wrote:
> Thanks for the information, Alexander.  Where are the newer version of kbd being maintained?  I'll try and get around to making a patch along the lines of what you posted above.  It might be wise to find an example of a non-UTF-8 keymap that is present in both kbd-1.12 and the latest upstream sources, so that it's one less thing to update when the new version is released.
>   

Maybe French (with Euro)?

# Begin /etc/sysconfig/console

UNICODE="1"
KEYMAP="fr-latin9"
LEGACY_CHARSET="iso-8859-15"
BROKEN_COMPOSE=0
FONT="lat0-16"

# End /etc/sysconfig/console

While verifying this, I also found that BROKEN_COMPOSE=0 is needed but 
it is not a documented option (a candidate for the errata). Please add 
the following to the errata page:

"The BROKEN_COMPOSE option for the /etc/sysconfig/console file is not 
documented, although it is necessary in some setups. The console 
bootscript, by default, assumes that composing and dead keys are broken 
in the UTF-8 keyboard mode, and clears the composition table in this 
mode. To stop it from doing this, add BROKEN_COMPOSE=0 to 
/etc/sysconfig/console. Note that composing and dead keys are indeed 
broken in UTF-8 keyboard mode if the keymap attempts to produce 
characters outside the Latin-1 range by this method."

Please also decide what to do with this default in the SVN book. Maybe 
drop the BROKEN_COMPOSE logic completely from the bootscript, even 
though this means that e.g. Czech keymap starts producing wrong 
characters instead of nothing when one tries to use dead keys? It worked 
with LFS-6.2, BTW, and the removal of the kernel patch was in fact a 
test whether the community would scream or LFS developers would notice a 
wrong step (thus confirming that they understand the issue). Neither 
happened. Sorry for announcing my sabotage attempt too late.

And BTW, the Polish example in the book is wrong (replace the "lat2a-16" 
font with "lat2-16" because of the wrong screen font map) - sorry for 
this mistake.

>
> So, in a UTF-8 environment, I don't need to supply a '-m' switch, correct?  That seems to be what the following suggests, as well (running an unpatched 2.6.22.6 kernel here).
>   

Correct - but it will be needed with the 2.6.23-rc6 kernel, because the 
same patch as in LFS-6.2 got applied, and the argument of this switch is 
used for conversion of dead keys (and Czech works with UTF-8, BTW).

As for the kbd-1.13 URL, here it is: 
ftp://ftp.altlinux.org/pub/people/legion/kbd/kbd-1.13.tar.bz2

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov