Re: How is 8-bit character support enabled for the TTY driver

Khimenko Victor (khim@sch57.msk.ru)
Wed, 8 Dec 1999 00:03:07 +0300 (MSK)


In <384D6492.4683238A@timpanogas.com> Jeff V. Merkey (jmerkey@timpanogas.com) wrote:

> Whomever owns the TTY drivers, how do you turn the damn thing on to
> allow you to display characters above 127?

Are you sure it's problem with TTY driver ???? At least here I can use
lynx locally and remotely to see russian web sites and all russian letters
are characters above 127 without any special tuning ! Standard minicom
settings do not work with characters above 127 but it's not related to kernel
at all !

> I am using the ncurses lib for building our nwfs utils with a CWorthy look
> and feel menuing interface, along with some management tools, and I cannot
> get characters aove 127 to display.

Lynx somehow doing it.

> If I use the VCS interface, then I can get it to work properly, but VCS
> screens cannot be accessed from remote terminals on other systems.

I can access it from good old patched NCSA telnet for DOS (standard NCSA
telnet does not support characters above 127 and again it's not linux kernel
problem) or from Windows's TTSSH ...

> I realize the expanding beyond 7 bits on the terminal display may not work
> on some terminals, but who gives a damn? Linux was a PC operating system,
> so this should be supported, and I only care about it working on Linux for
> the ncurses versions of the tools.

Linux (kernel) supports 8 bits just fine (starting from version 1.0.something
at least :-)... Userspace tools... It's other story :-/ But userspace
tools discussion is not for linux-kernel anyway :-)

> There is also a text based version of the tools that will work on everything,
> even 7 bit terminal, but we want to put out some fancier tools for folks
> with Linux, DOS, NT, etc.

It's not so simple. Even on console there are can be loaded fancy font
without graphic chars or with graphic chars in non-standard place (for
example KOI8-R/KOI8-U). Here in Russia usual setup is even more complicated:
-- cut --
setfont Cyr_a8x16
mapscrn koi2alt
printf "033(K"
-- cut --
due problems with graphics chars, VGA and KOI8-R encoding...

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