Arch Linux

luowei98

Member

Registered: 2009-10-27

Posts: 2

set consolefont to chinese font

hi,
Sorry for my english. I am a newbei to use Archlinux.
I set the locale to zh_CN.utf8, and how can I set consolefont in rc.conf to show chinese in the console.
I am not using xwindow.

my rc.conf:
LOCALE="zh_CN.utf8"
HARDWARECLOCK="localtime"
USEDIRECTISA="no"
TIMEZONE="Asia/Shanghai"
KEYMAP="us"
CONSOLEFONT=
CONSOLEMAP=
USECOLOR="yes"

my locale.gen
zh_CN.GB18030 GB18030 
zh_CN.GBK GBK 
zh_CN.UTF-8 UTF-8 
zh_CN GB2312

rekado

Member

From: Shanghai, China

Registered: 2009-01-13

Posts: 98

Website

Re: set consolefont to chinese font

Hi Luo Wei,
I've been trying the same but it seems to be impossible due to restrictions in console fonts. http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fonts#Console_fonts states that a console font is limited to 256 or 512 glyphs. This seems to be the reason why I was not able to find a Chinese console font yet.

---

musician & coder
http://elephly.net
http://github.com/rekado

sokuban

Member

Registered: 2006-11-11

Posts: 412

Re: set consolefont to chinese font

One thing you could do is use fbterm.

It is a terminal emulator that runs in the framebuffer (not X), and it can use normal ttf fonts so you can then see Chinese in a console. To type Chinese in the console, you would need this.

luowei98

Member

Registered: 2009-10-27

Posts: 2

Re: set consolefont to chinese font

thanks for your answer. and i will try fbterm.

rekado

Member

From: Shanghai, China

Registered: 2009-01-13

Posts: 98

Website

Re: set consolefont to chinese font

Thanks, sokuban, for the hint! I'll try it now.

EDIT: fbterm is a wonderful piece of software! Starting it directly from /etc/inittab. Still having minor issues, nothing related to garbled characters, though.

Last edited by rekado (2010-01-08 02:04:50)

---

musician & coder
http://elephly.net
http://github.com/rekado