unicode_start on second and following consoles

[Danilo Šegan]

Today at 12:42, "Shot (Piotr Szotkowski)" <shot at shot.pl> wrote:

>> On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 01:17:41PM +0100, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote:
>
>> > Currently, to have UTF-8 support on other-than-first console, one
>> > has to run unicode_start. Couldn't it be ran at boot time?
>> 
>> It's supposed to be already (although I wouldn't
>> be surprised if something was wrong with it).
>
> It's still there on a freshly updated
> Hoary machine (installed from Array CD 4).

FWIW, Linux console is smoking crack when it comes to UTF-8 encoding
(but that's widely known—it is not a full UTF-8 console, and as part
of the kernel, it shouldn't be; we'd need a full-featured user-mode
console if we really cared about UTF-8—check linux-utf8 discussions on
the topic in the past month).  Switching between X and consoles
unloads the font, and I get all the nice boxes for Cyrillic
characters. 

This wouldn't affect too many users, since they rarely switch from X,
if it didn't show up on shut-down (imagine looking at all the nice
boxes lined-up in bright red :).


So, basically, this was (a rant? :) just noting that this is actually
not Ubuntu problem.  Perhaps it can be hacked around (calling
"setfont" or "unicode_start" very often), but that's not the solution
IMHO.


Cheers,
Danilo