Language in FreeBSD

[Tijl Coosemans]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 02:09:26 +0200 ddddd dddd wrote:
> Hello. I am trying to change FreeBSD to Norwegian. Setting :lang in
> ~/.login_conf didn't work. Also, I don't know how much of FreeBSD is
> actually translated, if any. So if I can't get that to work, getting
> Norwegian letters working will be enough. When I installed, I selected
> Norwegian ISO keyboard map, Norwegian with code page 850 weren't
> available. However the extra Norwegian letters aren't working in csh,
> sh or vi, they show up as "\330" or something similar, at least in csh
> (I could give all details of how each program handle the keys if that
> will help).
> 
> I'm able to use the letters almost correctly in ee and the login-screen.
> The "å" and "æ" looks ok, but there's still problems there too when
> using ttyv: 
> -The "ø" looks like an "o", this might be a bug with the fonts in FreeBSD,
> because it still looks like an "o" in all the fonts I have tried, even
> when changing the ttyv from text mode to graphics mode with vidcontrol. I
> know it's not an actual "o", because I can't log in as root by typing
> røøt, even if it looks identical on the screen.
> 
> -I can't use combining accents, when I write "´" , it is shown immediately
> and I can't combine it with letters.
> 
> Neither of these two problems are there when running ee in xterm, but
> xterm still has the identical problem with csh, sh and vi not accepting
> the extra letters. Also, the Euro sign is not working in ttyv or xterm. I
> have none problem at all in Firefox, both the letters and Euro sign is
> working.
> 
> Does anyone know what to do?

For the euro sign you need iso-8859-15 so add something like this to
~/.login_conf:

me:\
	:charset=ISO-8859-15:\
	:lang=no_NO.ISO8859-15:

Then you must also use the iso15 console font.  In /etc/rc.conf:

font8x16="iso15-8x16"
font8x14="iso15-8x14"
font8x8="iso15-8x8"

For the keyboard it seems there's only norwegian.iso.  Other languages
also have a .iso.acc version which allows combining accents.  The format
of keymap files is very simple though.  They are simple text files
located in /usr/share/syscons/keymaps (described in keymap(5)).  You
could copy norwegian.iso.kbd to norwegian.iso.acc.kbd and then look at
"diff -u us.iso.kbd us.iso.acc.kbd" to see what changes can be made.
Then set keymap in rc.conf:

keymap="norwegian.iso.acc"

Once you are satisfied please submit the keymap in a bug report.