[Fedora-i18n-list] utf-8 national character input in Linux Konsole/KDE/X?

[Mikko Harjula]

I'm running KDE on Fedora Core 4, kernel 2.6.14-0.10.rrt.rhfc4.ccrma
(i.e. Planet CCRMA patched FC4 kernel, but the same problem occurs
with the FC4 kernel too):

$ konsole -v
Qt: 3.3.4
KDE: 3.4.2 Level "b"
Konsole: 1.5.2

My problem is that I cannot input national characters from keyboard in KDE
Konsole.  This used to work fine with my old RedHat 9 using iso-8859-1.  I
have the adiaeresis etc. keys on my keyboard.  I have googled around and
others having problems like this are trying to type chinese or other much more
complicated, so this must be something that should work right out of the box!

In virtual console (text mode you get with alt-FN, N=1-6 outside ox X) I can
type and see utf-8 characters.  If XXX is a string with national characters I
can say:

$ cat >XXX
XXX
^D
$ cat XXX
XXX
$

Also less works if I set LESSCHARSET to utf-8.  However even in
virtual console 'ls' shows utf-8 national characters in filenames as
two question marks.

In X (KDE) the default xterm (konsole) is worse.  I cannot type
national characters, not even as dead key sequences.  National
character keys and 'dead' keys print nothing and also swallow the
following characters.  The display shows only some small dots, smaller
and positioned a bit lower than a period.  The ls command prints the
"??" for each national char.  The 'cat XXX' shows the contents of the
file OK - of course I have to use wildcards to match the filename.
Less works too.  So it seems konsole can show utf-8 but the input
method is wrong.

In GNU Emacs 21.4.1 under X and in konsole (option -nw) entering
national characters produces nothing, dired shows national chars in
filenames correctly and displays file content correctly.

XEmacs 21.4 (patch 17) under X seems to work correctly with national
characters, but with -nw option input does not work anymore.

Xterm is a little better than Konsole because there I can type these
letters and they show up correctly, but every time I type one letter
the next letter is not displyed before I type something else.  And
this behaviour sticks even through returns, so it seems to be deep
inside some input processing as if these would be like dead keys.  By
the way the dead-key mechanism (pressing the diaeresis followed by a
produces adiaeresis) does not work either.

Currently I have:

$ env|egrep '^(LANG|LC_)'
LC_COLLATE=posix
LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8

and locale is:

$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: Tiedostoa tai hakemistoa ei ole
LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=posix
LC_MONETARY="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

The message "Tiedostoa tai hakemistoa ei ole" is "no such file" in Finnish.

My /etc/sysconfig/i18n contains:

LANG="fi_FI.UTF-8"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
SUPPORTED="fi_FI.UTF-8:fi_FI:fi"

My /etc/X11/xorg.conf has:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Keyboard0"
	Driver      "kbd"
	Option	    "XkbModel" "pc105"
	Option	    "XkbLayout" "fi"
EndSection

I don't have ~/.i18n or ~/.Xmodmap and I don't know if I should have one.

When I start xev and press and releas 'ä' I get:

KeyPress event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x2600001,
    root 0x5f, subw 0x0, time 36690043, (434,546), root:(438,567),
    state 0x10, keycode 48 (keysym 0xe4, adiaeresis), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (e4) "�
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (e4) "�
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 31, synthetic NO, window 0x2600001,
    root 0x5f, subw 0x0, time 36690142, (434,546), root:(438,567),
    state 0x10, keycode 48 (keysym 0xe4, adiaeresis), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (e4) "�

The adiaeresis seems to be correct but XLookupString gives something funny.

I have spent several days on this without any luck (including several
reinstalls) and would appreciate any help.  Also leads to in-depth
documentation thoroughly explaining the mechanisms involved when keycodes go
through kernel, X, KDE, konsole, bash and whatever would be mostly welcome.

-- 
Mikko Harjula                   puh. 010-525 1555
mikko.harjula at mediware.fi       gsm  040-778 6669