Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 76470
setfont is unable to activate ACM when executed from startup scripts
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:04 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 Description of problem: setfont is unable to activate ACM when executed from startup scripts. This affects output of the startup messages (like "Bringing up interface eth0") if /etc/sysconfig/i18n sets LANG variable to anything except "en_XX" Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n and set LANG to "ru_RU.koi8r" (or to any other locale which uses non-latin symbols) 2. Restart your system 3. Look at the messages during reboot & startup processes Actual Results: Locale-specific characters are not printed Expected Results: Locale-specific characters are printed Additional info: The root of a problem is that sysfont.c uses 'printf("\033(K");' statement to activate a console. Thus it writes control sequence to stdout, which is redirected by rc.d scripts. The possible solution is to write control sequence directly to the console (i.e. using something like 'write(console_fd, "\033(K",3);'). A good example of this is consoletool's consolechar.c program. Another (simplier) solution is to add 'echo -ne "\033(K" > /dev/console" command to one of the scripts (rc.d or /sbin/setsysfont)
Well, to be rigorous, this applies only to the locales which require ACM (actually many of them require)
this is not necessarily kbd and more of an initscripts (and other pkgs) problem, but has been fixed in the latest betas and rawhide. I'm seeing koi8r on test installs here.