Commandline Extended ASCII characters

[Lärs]

I am aiming to get the Extended ASCII character set to be displayed in pure Commandline mode (without X). It seems that only the first 127 characters of ASCII are displayed properly.

Not only that, but how can you get multiple textmode resolutions in the Commandline? I want to use standard 80 by 25 like in DOS.

Does the Linux CLI use a font or something, or is it like DOS and uses the ROM? If somebody could help me with my predicament, I'll be very thankful.

 

[moved from Software by spinynorman]

[Steve Scrimpshire]

The extended charset has something to do with the encoding you use. Maybe this reply will prompt iphitus to reply...he knows alot more about it. utf-8 is what you need i think.

[Lärs]

Thank you for your reply, Steve. I look forward for any more suggestions.

(EDIT:) If it's no trouble, I was also wondering on how Mouse support is done in X-less Linux. I'd probably be aiming at something similar to how mouse is done in DOS. I'll do a net search for this first though. I've done a search for the aforementioned topic to no avail.

Edited June 1, 2005 by Lärs

[Hirogen2]

I am aiming to get the Extended ASCII character set to be displayed in pure Commandline mode (without X).  It seems that only the first 127 characters of ASCII are displayed properly.

You need to set your console to UTF8.

Not only that, but how can you get multiple textmode resolutions in the Commandline?  I want to use standard 80 by 25 like in DOS.

If you want the standard 80x25, then you have to remove any "vga=..." option from the boot command line. To be able to change it at runtime, use SVGATextMode.

Does the Linux CLI use a font or something, or is it like DOS and uses the ROM?  If somebody could help me with my predicament, I'll be very thankful.

By default, it uses the Video ROMs glyphs, but you can load different glyphs into the video buffer (not ROM! - so it lasts only until reboot) using "setfont". Note that different fonts have different maps, because a VGA font usually has only 256 glyphs - no way to store all UTF8 characters - and many are different, e.g. some have russian at the high-byte range, some have "European" ... and whatnot. Some are ASCII(CP437)-coded, some are ISO coded. setfont got flags, ask if you need.