Re: [Tlf-devel] Red Hat console problem

[Bob Nielsen]

On Nov 20, 2005, at 9:04 AM, Bob Nielsen wrote:

> On Nov 20, 2005, at 7:47 AM, Marco - IK5ROS - VE3/IK5ROS wrote:
>
> > Hi everybody,
> > I have installed Fedora Core 4 without X and I'm running  console  
> > mode, when I started TLF (latest version) the color scheme are ok  
> > but the horizontal and vertical lines are substituted by a  
> > qqqqqqqqqqq and xxxxx. I tried to set the variable TERM but  
> > nothing to do.
> > The console problem was on Red Hat 9 also.
> > Any idea to set the terminal to working ok?
>
> What is your $LOCALE environmental variable setting?  I get this  
> with a lot of applications which use ncurses when using UTF-8, but  
> not with ISO-8851.  I don't know if this is a bug with UTF-8 or a  
> configuration problem, but it is annoying.
>
> Bob N7XY

On Nov 20, 2005, at 9:04 AM, Bob Nielsen wrote:


> On Nov 20, 2005, at 7:47 AM, Marco - IK5ROS - VE3/IK5ROS wrote:
>
>
> > Hi everybody,
> > I have installed Fedora Core 4 without X and I'm running  console  
> > mode, when I started TLF (latest version) the color scheme are ok  
> > but the horizontal and vertical lines are substituted by a  
> > qqqqqqqqqqq and xxxxx. I tried to set the variable TERM but  
> > nothing to do.
> > The console problem was on Red Hat 9 also.
> > Any idea to set the terminal to working ok?
>
> What is your $LOCALE environmental variable setting?  I get this  
> with a lot of applications which use ncurses when using UTF-8, but  
> not with ISO-8851.  I don't know if this is a bug with UTF-8 or a  
> configuration problem, but it is annoying.
>
> Bob N7XY

Looking a bit further, I found the following in the ncurses FAQ at  
<http://dickey.his.com/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html>:

-----

Line-drawing characters come out as x's and q's

The x's and q's correspond to a table (from terminfo/termcap) which  
tells ncurses how to map the "alternate" character set to the  
terminal's set of graphic characters. The reference for this table  
comes from the vt100. If the unmapped characters appear, then the  
terminal emulator does not recognize the escape sequence for  
switching between normal and alternate fonts that is given in the  
terminfo description.
There are several cases of note:
Terminal emulators which use a different escape sequence or different  
range for mapping the resulting characters. For instance the so- 
called vt100-compatibles such as Linux console and Tera Term.
Terminal emulators which are locale-sensitive. Again, Linux console  
is a problem area when running in UTF-8 mode, since its nominal vt100- 
compatibility is further lessened by ignoring the escape sequences  
dealing with fonts. The screen utility also has the same problem;  
whether to make the implementation simple or to copy the Linux  
console, it ignores vt100-style font switching when the locale is a  
UTF-8 flavor.
For the first case, you simply have to find the correct terminfo  
description. Fixing the latter is harder, since the damage is done  
outside ncurses. (Though one can easily make things compatible enough  
that this particular issue would never appear, that style of solution  
is not deemed proper by some coders).
The normal ncurses libraries support 8-bit characters. The ncurses  
library can also be configured (--enable-widec) to support wide- 
characters (for instance Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding). The  
corresponding wide-character ncursesw libraries are source-compatible  
with the normal applications. That is, applications must be compiled  
and linked against the ncursesw library.
The ncurses 5.3 release provides UTF-8 support. The special cases of  
Linux console and screen were addressed in development patches  
completed at the end of 2002.

-----

From the above, I suspect recompiling some of the applications using  
libncursesw instead of the normal libncurses should help, although I  
haven't tried that yet.

73, Bob N7XY