NetBSD and ISO8859-2

This short article aims to help people that want to use ISO8859-2 character encoding in NetBSD/i386's wscons(4) console. It is very brief, so if you understand Slovak language, I recommend you to read NetBSD Slovak & Czech HOWTO instead. All files you will need for ISO8859-2-ing your console in are in this tarball: http://ovecka.be/~lkundrak/netbsd-sk_cz-howto/netbsd-sk_cz-howto.tar

Font

To set iso8859-2 fonts on NetBSD/i386 wscons(4) console you basically need to do this:

• Copy isolat2.816 to /usr/share/wscons/fonts/isolat2.816
• Add a line for that font to wscons.conf(5)

  font    latin2  -       16      iso     /usr/share/wscons/fonts/isolat2.816

• Enable fonts for all virtual terminals with theese lines in rc.local(5)

  LAST=4  # provided that you have 5 virtual terminals configured (0-4)
  for term in $(/usr/bin/seq 0 $LAST)
  do
          /sbin/wsconsctl -f /dev/ttyE$term -d -w font=latin2
  done

• Either reboot the machine, or at least restart startup scripts corresponding to configuration files you modified:

  # /etc/rc.d/wscons forcerestart
  # sh /etc/rc.local

Keymap

For complete iso8859-2 input from pckbd(4) keyboard you need a patch for both kernel and wsconsctl(8). It's because NetBSD does not know about some iso8859-2 characters, specifically characters with caron (hacek) and dead caron key. So do the following:

• Install NetBSD source sets and the compiler set comp.tgz
• Apply a NetBSD-lat2.diff patch

  # cd /usr/src
  # patch < ~/NetBSD-lat2.diff

• Recompile and reinstall wsconsctl(8)

  # cp /usr/src/sys/dev/wscons/wsksymdef.h /usr/include/dev/wscons/wsksymdef.h
  # cd /usr/src/sbin/wsconsctl
  # make USETOOLS=Yes
  # make USETOOLS=Yes install

• Recompile the kernel and reboot
• Now you might want to write a keyboard map, or use a czech or slovak one either modified or unmodified:
  • pckbd.sk.iso8859-2
  • pckbd.sk-qwerty.iso8859-2
  • pckbd.cz.iso8859-2
  • pckbd.cz-qwerty.iso8859-2
• Add your a line for your keymap to wsconsctl(8)

  mapfile /usr/share/wscons/keymaps/pckbd.sk.iso8859-2

• Load the new map

  # /etc/rc.d/wscons forcerestart

Furure revisions & TODO

This is revision $Revision: 1.3 $. Any suggestions for improvements, fixes, etc. are welcome.