Re: Linux console internationalization

[mikko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mikko Paananen)]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 12:54:26AM +0200, Andries.Brouwer@xxxxxx wrote:

> There will be a new kbd release soon, mostly because
> 2.6 has some changes.

Do you have webpage or cvs for that package? I would like to see "work
in progress", since I think it's time remove those keymaps that use
obsolete ISO-646 encodings.

[historical background: ISO-646 is a group of several 7-bit national
ASCII variations where some symbols where replaced with letters used
to write european languages. Like finnish charset ISO-646.FI replaced
ascii's [\]{|} with ÄÖÅäöå. Also other languages used similar but bit
different encodings like german needed to replace some character in
ascii for their letters ßüäöÜÄÖ. This convention disappeared in late
'80 along with dumb terminals (also newer terminals used 8-bit codes
like DEC multinational, ancestor for latin1) ]

I have a problem understanding why linux keymap "fi" (and several
others) still use those 7-bit codes and proper keymap is named
"fi-latin1" (which actually uses latin9 symbols for euro and several
other characters) There seems to be same problem with several other
languages.

So, it would be less confusing if current, latin/unicode keymap would
be fi.kmap and those 7-bit keymaps named fi-old.kmap or removed.
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/