Unicode Console?

[Dominic Fandrey]

Kevin Monceaux wrote:
> Fellow FreeBSD Fans,
> 
> I've been running FreeBSD on a web/mail server, which I only have remote 
> access to, for a while now.  At home I've been running Linux since the 
> 1.xx kernel days but am considering switching my desktop box to FreeBSD.
> 
> I never given much thought to my locale setting until recently.  I'm 
> about to start participating in an online Spanish study group, via 
> e-mail, and might also be following along with an Old English study 
> group.  I'm an old fashioned kinda user and prefer to do as much as I 
> can via the text console.  I compose/read e-mail via Alpine.  After some 
> trial and error I finally convinced my Linux box, currently running Arch 
> Linux, to handle all of the "special" characters I need via the 
> console.  In the end, it amounted to:
> 
> 1.  Add "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" to /etc/locale.gen
> 
> 2.  run locale-gen
> 
> 3.  set LANG to en_US.UTF-8
> 
> 4.  Switch to a font that contains the symbols I need.  I'm currently
>     using one of the Terminus console fonts.  For some reason I had to
>     switch to a framebuffer console otherwise after executing
>     unicode_start the font was way too dim.
> 
> 5.  run unicode_start(added to my .cshrc file)

All this is not necessary. Just set the encoding in "/etc/login.conf" and 
run cap_mkdb on it afterwards. This is from my login.conf:

	:charset=UTF-8:\
	:lang=en_GB.UTF-8:\

You can also set this on a per-user basis in the file "~/.login_conf".

It won't work for the console, but in a terminal emulator (I prefer 
rxvt-unicode, but uxterm should also work.) it works fine. My FreeBSD system 
uses UTF-8 and I never encountered problems because of this. You just have 
to remember to mount fat devices with "-L $LANG".

The only thing to take care of is that the machine you're SSHing from uses 
the same charset.