Gentoo Archives: gentoo-admin

From: "Florian v. Savigny" <lorian@××××××××.de>
To: gentoo-admin@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-admin] Kernel update messed up console encoding
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:16:46
Message-Id: 0ML25U-1LafXv1vQd-0006TL@mrelayeu.kundenserver.de
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