Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel update messed up console encoding

["Florian v. Savigny" <lorian@fsavigny.de>]

Dear Sebastian,

thank you for your thoughts. I am afraid switching to UTF-8 for
everything, although I see that this is the sound thing to do
eventually, is not currently an option for me - there are far too many
things which depend on that.  (Also, it would tend to obscure or
complicate the problem rather than fix it, since Emacs obviously gets
confused by the console behaviour).

> there still is /etc/conf.d/consolefont that could mess up things

The only variable that's set there is CONSOLEFONT="cp1250". I would
not understand how the font could have an influence on the characters
*produced* by the console, and it seems also difficult to explain why
the shell and Emacs, which of course use the same console font, behave
differently. (Under the shell, it looks fine while you type it,
i.e. you cannot tell that your u umlaut actually consists of two
bytes. But Emacs displays the lower-case umlauts followed by a space
(i.e. two characters, but not those that most of us are probably quite
familiar with, i.e. which you see when UTF-8 is displayed as if it
were ASCII), while for upper-case umlauts and the eszett complains
that e.g. "\204 is undefined".)

It definitely looks to me as if the core of the problem is what the
console produces, not what it shows, i.e. what a keypress
produces. The variable CONSOLETRANSLATION is commented out, meaning I
am using the "default one", whichever that is.

As to the locale, where can I look that up ... ? I seem to remember I
purposely use no locale (or "C", I think), but I don't remember where
I set that.

CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT is indeed different for the two kernels, but not in
a way that seems to explain anything, as those two encodings differ
only on a few positions (not umlauts or eszett):

linux-2.6.17-gentoo-r7:	"iso8859-15"
linux-2.6.27-gentoo-r8:	"iso8859-1"

Also, I think what I said last time holds: that only applies to
filenames in the filesystem, doesn't it?

I'll follow your suggestion and re-post the problem on gentoo-user-de,
although I think running into that sort of problem might happen to
anybody who uses a European language other than English (one of those
covered by iso-8859-1, more precisely), so comments here are still
welcome! But who still sometimes uses the console, except me?

I think I'll also write a small script that compares the settings in
the two kernel .configs systematically. Could also be of use for later
kernel updates ...

Thanks very much!

Florian