1 |
Dear listmates, |
2 |
|
3 |
not entirely sure whether this shouldn't go to gentoo-kernel or rather |
4 |
to gentoo-user, but I figured system administration was more or less |
5 |
situated somewhere between these. ;-) |
6 |
|
7 |
I recently updated my kernel from 2.6.17 to 2.6.27, and it seems that |
8 |
this caused the encoding of the console to behave weird: I used to use |
9 |
the default Unix encoding, i.e. iso-8859-1, because this was fine for |
10 |
German (now I want to stick to it because there's so much legacy |
11 |
material in that encoding). |
12 |
|
13 |
Now, when I type a string with Non-ASCII characters on the |
14 |
commandline, it looks normal, but when I redirect this to a file, the |
15 |
file command identifies the contents of that file (correctly, it seems |
16 |
to me) as UTF-8. When I boot the old kernel (which I kept), the same |
17 |
procedure results in a file identified as iso-8859-1 (and with |
18 |
accordingly fewer bytes). Here are the contents (the same sentence): |
19 |
|
20 |
Kernel 2.6.17: |
21 |
|
22 |
"Ich kann es außerdem nicht ändern" |
23 |
|
24 |
Kernel 2.6.27: |
25 |
|
26 |
"Ich kann es außerdem nicht ändern" |
27 |
|
28 |
(I don't know how these will look in this message, but the second |
29 |
string is actually two bytes longer.) |
30 |
|
31 |
I grepped the .config files for any options that might have a bearing |
32 |
on this. The only difference I found was in the first of these four |
33 |
lines: |
34 |
|
35 |
linux-2.6.17: |
36 |
|
37 |
# CONFIG_NLS_ASCII is not set |
38 |
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_1=y |
39 |
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_15=y |
40 |
CONFIG_NLS_UTF8=y |
41 |
|
42 |
linux-2.6.27 |
43 |
|
44 |
CONFIG_NLS_ASCII=y |
45 |
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_1=y |
46 |
CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_15=y |
47 |
CONFIG_NLS_UTF8=y |
48 |
|
49 |
But as far as I understand, these refer to the handling of file names |
50 |
(it's in the section "file systems"), so I don't see how this could |
51 |
have an effect on console encoding. |
52 |
|
53 |
The only thing I am dead sure about is that the kernel itself must be |
54 |
the culprit, because when I boot the old kernel, this behaviour goes |
55 |
away. There is absolutely no change in the system otherwise. (The |
56 |
UNICODE variable in /etc/rc.conf is set to "no".) |
57 |
|
58 |
Can anyone give me a hint where to look what I have messed up? Emacs, |
59 |
which I sometimes like to use on the console, is really uncomfortable |
60 |
with this, and I seem to write confusing e-mails. |
61 |
|
62 |
Many thanks in advance, |
63 |
|
64 |
Florian |