Ev3dev: Cyrillic characters on EV3 screen?

[AXKuhta]

What are you trying to do?

Trying to display russian text on EV3 screen (in console mode)
I installed and configured console-cyrillic package and also generated ru_RU.UTF-8 locale.

What did you expect to happen?

To see russian text when outputting it in console on EV3 screen.

What actually happened?

Only those characters that have non-cyrillic analogues (Like capital T, a and o) outputted correctly, characters like Ж and Я looked like rectangle symbols.
It works as intended in SSH.

What hardware and software are you using (including version numbers)?

EV3 brick, 2017-06-09 ev3dev image

[dlech]

Did you select the font using the setfont command?

Some relevant man pages:

• https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/kbd/setfont.8.en.html
• https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/console-setup-mini/console-setup.5.en.html
• https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/manpages/locale.1.en.html

[AXKuhta]

Setting font to one of the unicode fonts in /usr/share/consolefonts/ fixed the cyrillic characters but it also resulted in empty spaces being displayed as zeros (i.e. clear fills screen with zeros) or other symbols, depending on font

[dlech]

I'm not sure what could be causing that.

[dlech]

What kernel version are you using? There seems to be a problem in ev3dev-stretch (4.9.x kernel).

[dlech]

Meh... It looks like the in-kernel fbcon doesn't support unicode. There was a patch a while back, but it looks like it was never taken to completion.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/11/26/50

[dlech]

:tada: :ru: :sparkles:

I finally figured it out. Install the console-cyrillic package...

sudo apt update
sudo apt install console-cyrillic

Set the locale to a non-UTF8 locale. I tested with ru_RU.ISO-8859-5, but there is also ru_RU.CP1251 and ru_RU.KOI8-R. Alternatively, you can just generate one of these locales and leave the default as UTF8, in which case you will need to export LANG=ru_RU.ISO-8859-5 in the virtual console.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Then, in the virtual console...

unicode_stop
setfont /usr/share/console-cyrillic/alt_8x14.psf -m /usr/share/console-cyrillic/iso-8859-5.screenmap

The font can be any of the .psf files in /usr/share/console-cyrillic and the -m argument should match the locale you chose.

[dlech]

It looks like there are some fonts that ship with ev3dev as well, so installing the console-cyrillic package is not necessary.

unicode_stop
setfont CyrSlav-Fixed13 -m /usr/share/consoletrans/ISO-8859-5.acm.gz

[AXKuhta]

Can confirm that this worked, thanks!