[Fedora-livecd-list] Console fonts

[Richard W.M. Jones]

I'm trying to enable a broad range of languages in virt-p2v, and to do
that, understand how to enable a broad Unicode console font.  I notice
that Anaconda does this already, but I'm having a bit of trouble
understanding exactly how.

Anyway, first of all I discovered that if one adds the 'kbd' package
to the live CD, then you get a UTF-8 console (/bin/unicode_start runs
early on) and the default font is 'latarcyrheb-sun16'.  The font, as
the name may suggest, supports Latin-1, Arabic(?), Cyrillic and Hebrew
characters.

Example tests (shows error message in exotic characters):

  LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 ls /nothere
  LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8 ls /nothere

But note that these fail (square blocks displayed instead of
characters):

  LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8 ls /nothere
  LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 ls /nothere

This doesn't give me any Asian language support, and I couldn't see a
console font which does.  Note I'd like to display all languages at
the same time, because the first screen lets the user pick their
language.

Anaconda seems to do some trickery where it saves something (a
character map??) by issuing a KD_FONT_OP_GET ioctl, and then restores
this when the CD boots.  I'm not sure when the saving occurs, or the
relationship between these rather small maps (about 5K each) and the
presumably much larger fonts that are required to support them.

So can anyone help?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v