On Sat, 6 Sep 2008 12:56:52 -0700 (PDT), jim wrote:

>Problem: all the accented characters in latin-1 are mapped to the same
>glyph, a reverse-video questionmark.
>Prior to the upgrade, they were displayed correctly.
....
>The box is a Dell Gx1p with 400Mhz PII and ATI 3D RagePro AGP video.
>I'm using Slackware 11.x (which
>originally had kernel 2.4), minimally upgraded to run kernel 2.6.24.5-
>smp from Slackware 12.1. Because
>this was a partial, piecemeal upgrade, I may have accidentally broken
>the console font setup in some
>obscure way, but I've read the kbd doc without finding out how to fix
>it. Almost everything else works fine.

A strange way to update the kernel, I suggest you compile a custom
kernel for the box which correctly references slack-11 libraries...

Grant.
--
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind.

jim writes:

> Problem: all the accented characters in latin-1 are mapped to the same
> glyph, a reverse-video questionmark.
> Prior to the upgrade, they were displayed correctly.
> Examining the character codes, I can see that they are what I expect,
> i.e. different latin-1 accented characters.

In latest linux 2.6 kernel, console defaults to UTF-8.

You can append this to your lilo boot command line to disable
this:

vt.default_utf8=0

Hope this helps.

Grant wrote:
> A strange way to update the kernel, I suggest you compile a custom
> kernel for the box which correctly references slack-11 libraries...

Sorry, I was trying to be terse; I attempted a minimal upgrade to
allow the use
of kernel 2.6, but I tried to be careful, so I also upgraded glibc,
the package utilities,
the kernel modules, their utilities, lilo, udev, other stuff I don't
remember, and also bash,
zoneinfo, binutils and gcc.

The console font breakage was the most obvious unexpected consequence,
closely followed by cursor strangeness on leaving and returning to
text mode.
"Serious" functionality was preserved :-) :-)

On Sep 7, 4:50*am, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> In latest linux 2.6 kernel, console defaults to UTF-8.
>
> You can append this to your lilo boot command line to disable
> this:
>
> vt.default_utf8=0
>
> Hope this helps.

Thank you! This seems very promising; I'll try it when I get home.

On Sep 7, 4:50*am, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> jim writes:
> > Problem: all the accented characters in latin-1 are mapped to the same
> > glyph, a reverse-video questionmark.
> In latest linux 2.6 kernel, console defaults to UTF-8.

I discovered that I had the kbd_mode command, so I can now return the
console to "ascii"
mode one vt at a time; I also tried the loadunimap command and setfont
-m with various
fontmaps including "def.uni" and "trivial".

None of this had any effect on the problem that the different accented
characters are all
rendered as the same glyph. Exactly which glyph it is depends on what
console font I load:
the video card native font gives a square blob, and the default,
lat1-16 and iso8859-1 fonts
give a blank and two slightly different reverse-video question marks.
As mentioned before,
showconsolefont confirms that the accented glyphs are available (in
different locations in
different fonts :-), but not used.

The kbd package also comes with a demo script which is supposed to set
UTF-8 mode, display
selected code points and their glyphs, and then restore ascii mode.
On my box, this demo
exhibits the same problem: most of the displayed glyphs are the same,
though their text
descriptions indicate that they should be different.

Anyone have any clues about where to look next?