Re: Normal mode patch

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Wednesday 07 January 2004 18:41, Marco Gerards wrote:
> Would it be possible to extend PUPA with a gdb stub?

Ah, I didn't think of it. That's a good idea.

> Do you mean with this "kind of bug"?  The crash or making it easier
> to debug?

I mean, silly bugs.

> What is the reason why you wrote this VGA driver?  For portability?

No.

> It is possible to show unicode characters in VGA text mode.  The new
> Hurd console works like this.

I don't want to say this, but the Hurd console is ridiculous. It was 
written by one who only knew small codesets. IIRC, Marcus said that he 
didn't want to work on good i18n support, and said that someone else 
who would be interested should work, as there was code. I respect his 
philosophy, but this means that you should take into account that his 
work may not be very good.

Technically speaking, VGA text mode can support only 256 characters. 
This limitation would be sufficient for European, but not for Asian.

Suppose that you have 80x30 screen, then you can show at most 2400 
characters at a time. Obviously, this number is greater than 256. So 
VGA text mode does not work.

Even worse, you can use only fixed fonts in VGA text mode. I don't think 
fixed fonts could be enough for Hindi or Arabic.

Therefore, VGA or VESA is required for real i18n. Please do not refer to 
a bad implementation. Instead, see some implementations of 
multilingualized console for Linux, such as jfbterm.

Of course, there is one more reason why it is required, that is, to 
implement a graphical menu interface correctly. This is critical to 
prevent project forking.

Okuji