Re: Normal mode patch

[Marco Gerards]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> > Do you mean with this "kind of bug"?  The crash or making it easier
> > to debug?
> 
> I mean, silly bugs.

Ah, ok.

> > 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.

Well, Marcus is not really stupid.  I know the console code (server
and client) in detail and I must say it is quite nice.  What do you
mean with i18n support?  Is this UTF-8?  If that is what you mean,
UTF-8 (and other encodings) are supported.

If I recall correctly Marcus considered things like writing backwards,
etc.  Perhaps he did not implement it but I'm sure he kept it in mind.

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

You can use use 512 characters, in that case you will have less
colors.

About the Hurd console, it has plug-in support so you can load a
framebuffer driver for example.

> 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.

You've got a point here. :)

> 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.

Right.

> 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.

Well, I just mentioned it because I personally like it (Please notice
that I only use English, Dutch, Esperanto and German so I won't need
that many characters).  Please report the problems you have with the
Hurd console.  What about adding some tasks related to i18n support?

I'm getting a little off-topic now... :)

> 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.

Oh, yes!  This really bothers me about bug-grub, all those bug reports
from suse/redhat users who have problems with suse/redhat features.

Thanks,
Marco