| 2008-11-26 11:30:58 |
Colin Watson |
description |
This is a continuation of Bug #19487 and Bug #29523, but since it seems (at least in Feisty Faun) to involve echoing to screen rather than the keyboard, I thought I should post it as a separate item.
Following previous discussions, I tried locale-gen fr_CA and rebooted, but the problem did not go away. Incidentally, the system told me it was generating fr_CA.ISO-8859-1 but this entity was nowhere to be found even after I had updated the database.
Therefore I am repeating the note I sent to answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu , with the added remark that a fix is urgently needed as no civilized person can get along without using the occasional Umlaut, cedilla, or tilde.
[ Repeat from "answers":]
There is a problem with the echoing of characters to the screen when in tty (virtual terminal) mode. At first I thought this was related to fonts in general, but apparently it is not. A brief discussion can be read in the user forum:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=512717
The environment: Feisty Fawn with kernel 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP. I don't remember how the terminal font was selected upon installation, but on checking the "Language Support" menu it appears that I checked English and French, and specified "English (Canada)" as the default language. I also checked "Enable support to enter complex characters". In the "Keyboard Preferences"
menu, the keyboard model is "Generic 105-key (intl) PC" and the layout is "Canada French (legacy)": but I doubt the keyboard layout is relevant here in view of the fact that everything works in GUI mode.
For example, in tty the e-acute key (é) is echoed as a blank space on the screen. If I type it to a text file I cannot see it; but on
reading the same file with a terminal in GUI mode, the character é is displayed properly. The same is true of all characters. Thus the font of the tty virtual terminals is identical to that of the GUI terminal. The problem is with echoing to the screen.
The following is the arrangement of the four rows of characters as I see them on the GUI terminal (it is possible that you might not see them the same way). For each now, alt-keys are listed on the top sub-row; shift-keys on the middle sub-row; lowercase-keys on the bottom sub-row: The explanatory notes are not necessarily exhaustive.
¬ ¹ @ ³ ¼ ½ ¾ { [ ] } | [1] [2]
° ! " # $ % ? & * ( ) _ + À <-- the last character is capital A-grave
° 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - = à <-- the last character is l.c. a-grave
q w e ¶ t ¥ u i ø þ ° [3]
Q W E R T Y U I O P [4] Ç <-- the last character is capital C-cedilla
q w e r t y u i o p [4] ç <-- the last character is l.c. c-cedilla
æ ß ð ª g h j k l [5] {
A S D F G H J K L : È <-- the last character is capital E-grave
a s d f g h j k l ; è <-- the last character is l.c. e-grave
\ « » ¢ v b n µ < > / <-- 2nd and 3rd characters are guillemets
Ù Z X C V B N M ' . É <-- the last character is capital E-acute
ù z x c v b n m , . é <-- the last character is l.c. e-acute
NOTES:
[1] In GUI: dead key for French ç or Turkish ş.
On tty: all different.
[2] In GUI: dead key for accent sloping up to the left, e.g. ò.
On tty: all different.
[3] In GUI: dead key for tilde; follow with a space to get ~.
On tty: alt + space makes ~; other combinations are different.
[4] In GUI: dead key for circumflex; follow with a space to get ^.
On tty: makes ^ with space; other combinations are different.
[5] In GUI: dead key for accent sloping up to the right, e.g. í.
On tty: all different.
For all but the ordinary, unaccented characters, the virtual terminal screen echoes what seem to be IBM Code Page 437 characters. The following is what I see in tty mode. The quote marks surround code numbers corresponding to the Code Page 437 glyphs (as best I could identify them) that resemble what I see. The word "same" indicates that I see the same things in tty and GUI modes; the number preceeding "same" indicates how many characters in a row (horizontally) are the same in both modes - e.g., "q", "w", and "e" in the 2nd row with alt are the same in both modes, therefore 3same is noted. A question mark ? indicates that I couldn't be sure of the character code or that the result varied when a dead key was used with different letters.
TOP ROW, ALT
"202", "211", 1same, "205", "214", "215", "216", 5same, ?, ?
TOP ROW, SHIFT
"176", 12same, "218"
TOP ROW, L.C.
"176", 12same, "248"
2ND ROW, ALT
3same, "208", 1same, "005", 2same, "015", "021", "176", see [3]
2ND ROW, SHIFT
10same, see [4], "224"
2ND ROW, L.C.
10same, see [4], "223 ?"
3RD ROW, ALT
?, "247", ?, "190", 5same, ?, 1same
3RD ROW, SHIFT
10same, "225"
3RD ROW, L.C.
10same, blank
4TH ROW, ALT
1same, "191", "213", "004", 3same, "207", 3same
4TH ROW, SHIFT
"242", 9same, "226"
"016", 9same, blank
What I think should happen, of course, is that I would see the same things in tty mode as on the GUI terminal. |
This is a long-running problem with several different incarnations. Bug 91422 was caused by the splash screen forgetting to save and restore the console font when switching to and from graphics mode, fixed in Ubuntu 7.10. In https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/hardy-console, we proposed a fix in the kernel which would deal with this problem centrally rather than having to fix every single X driver individually, and this was fixed in Ubuntu 8.04. However, Ubuntu 8.10 and Jaunty still exhibit similar symptoms, so I'm grabbing this bug to serve as a sink for duplicates.
At the moment, the console is not set up correctly because /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, etc. do not exist at the point when console-setup's initramfs script tries to deal with this. The simple fix is to have it create those devices itself, and once I do this I find that the console is set up correctly.
I think we should backport this fix at least to hardy and intrepid, and possibly gutsy as well; I see no downside in doing so.
TEST CASE: Install in Georgian (to pick a language where it's fairly obvious), and switch to Ctrl-Alt-F1 after installation. Confirm that you can type Georgian letters and that they display as something that actually looks like letters rather than blank spaces or obvious visual corruption.
|
|
| 2008-11-27 18:50:35 |
Colin Watson |
description |
This is a long-running problem with several different incarnations. Bug 91422 was caused by the splash screen forgetting to save and restore the console font when switching to and from graphics mode, fixed in Ubuntu 7.10. In https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/hardy-console, we proposed a fix in the kernel which would deal with this problem centrally rather than having to fix every single X driver individually, and this was fixed in Ubuntu 8.04. However, Ubuntu 8.10 and Jaunty still exhibit similar symptoms, so I'm grabbing this bug to serve as a sink for duplicates.
At the moment, the console is not set up correctly because /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, etc. do not exist at the point when console-setup's initramfs script tries to deal with this. The simple fix is to have it create those devices itself, and once I do this I find that the console is set up correctly.
I think we should backport this fix at least to hardy and intrepid, and possibly gutsy as well; I see no downside in doing so.
TEST CASE: Install in Georgian (to pick a language where it's fairly obvious), and switch to Ctrl-Alt-F1 after installation. Confirm that you can type Georgian letters and that they display as something that actually looks like letters rather than blank spaces or obvious visual corruption.
|
This is a long-running problem with several different incarnations. Bug 91422 was caused by the splash screen forgetting to save and restore the console font when switching to and from graphics mode, fixed in Ubuntu 7.10. In https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/hardy-console, we proposed a fix in the kernel which would deal with this problem centrally rather than having to fix every single X driver individually, and this was fixed in Ubuntu 8.04. However, Ubuntu 8.10 and Jaunty still exhibit similar symptoms, so I'm grabbing this bug to serve as a sink for duplicates.
At the moment, the console is not set up correctly because /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, etc. do not exist at the point when console-setup's initramfs script tries to deal with this. The simple fix is to have it create those devices itself, and once I do this I find that the console is set up correctly.
I think we should backport this fix at least to hardy and intrepid, and possibly gutsy as well; I see no downside in doing so.
DEVELOPMENT BRANCH: Fixed in console-setup 1.28ubuntu3.
PATCH: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/console-setup/ubuntu/revision/86
TEST CASE: Install in Georgian (to pick a language where it's fairly obvious), and switch to Ctrl-Alt-F1 after installation. Confirm that you can type Georgian letters and that they display as something that actually looks like letters rather than blank spaces or obvious visual corruption. |
|
