News [Unicode support]

[James S. <jsi...@ac...>]

Hi!
  
   I see lots of posting last month :-) Shows the project is starting to
get a little attention. We still are at the alpha level of code and have
much to do yet. By alpha I mean we don't have all the sub systems running
(like fbdev). Here is what needs to be done yet:

1) Fix that reboot crashing. When you press alt-ctrl-del it reboots fine
   except if you press the keyboard durning reboot. I added code to prevent 
   more event packets from coming in. This stopped the instant crashed 
   after pressing ctrl-alt-del but it still crashes if you press any key
   while rebooting. Still working on it.

2) I see alot of global variables in keyboard.c. Have to see if it is 
   safe to use them. 

2) Better unicode support. Thanks to a patch from Edmund I'm working on a 
   and testing unicode code for selections. Now you will be able to cut
   and paste w_chars (when in VC_UNICODE mode) as well as regular 8 bit
   chars.

2) Documentation on how a key press is turned into a font displayed on
   the screen. I have been following threw that code recently. Boy was
   that fun. 
 
3) New screenbuf layout. I have been talking to Paul Williams about
   unicode and how to handle it. Right now the console system has a
   VC_UNICODE flag to tell the console system to use UTF-8 and peice 
   together bytes to display w_chars. The problem is in this mode you
   lose the C1 control characters (Stuff like echo -e '\033[?17;0;64c').
   He pointed out to me how Unicode 3.0 hints on how to handle this. That
   is to extend the 8 bit squences such as:
 
   ESC  [   ?   5   h
   1b  5b  3f  35  68

   out to:

   ESC   [    ?    5    h
   001b 005b 003f 0035 0068

   I might arrange the screenbuf to be a UCS-2 buffer. Right the console
   system trnaslates the unicode values into the native VGA text hardware
   layout in the screenbuffer. I might remove that step and have vgacon
   translate it itself. 

4) Work out the keymap per VT or possibly VC thing. 

MS: (n) 1. A debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that
renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task. 2. A disease.

James Simmons  [jsi...@li...]               ____/| 
fbdev/console/gfx developer                             \ o.O| 
http://www.linux-fbdev.org                               =(_)= 
http://linuxgfx.sourceforge.net                            U
http://linuxconsole.sourceforge.net