As for now, the choice is mainly between windows-1251 and
iso-8859-5. Windows-1251 provides compatibility with M$
Windows and it is is by far the most popular charset for
nearly all slavic languages. On the other side, iso-8859-5 is
better supported and easier to set up.
The present HOWTO will explain the use of both charsets in
parallel. Unless otherwise stated in the text, Belarusian
support package from
the bellinux page
contains all the files mentioned in the present HOWTO.
Windows-1251 support in the kernel is needed to visualize MS
Windows filenames in cyrillic while the console and X Window
system are localized in windows-1251. As latest FAT file
systems store filenames in Unicode, we have to define the
output charset of the Virtual File System layer and install
the support for windows-1251 in the kernel.
There is a patch for 2.2.14 kernels that is included in the
Belarusian support package. To apply the patch,
cd /path_to_your_kernel_source_tree
patch -p0 < patch_for_the_kernel.patch
Recompile and reinstall the kernel modules.
Refer to
Kernel-HOWTO
for the details.
Add
codepage=866,iocharset=microsoft-cp1251
to your mount options in order to get the filenames in
windows-1251.
To test the setup, execute
mount /dev/hda -t vfat -o codepage=866,iocharset=iso8859-5 /mnt/hda
as root. Of course, you should replace /dev/hda by the
name of your vfat partitions containing names in
cyrillic.
There is built-in support for iso-8859-5 in Linux kernel.
To enable iso-8859-5, make sure you compile this module
in the nls section of the kernel setup. Normally, iso-8859-5
is compiled by default and can be loaded either automatically
or by issuing
insmod nls_iso8859-5
as root.
Add
codepage=866,iocharset=iso8859-5
to your mount options in order to get the filenames in
iso-8859-5.
Belarusian locale is available in glibc 2.2 and later.
If you do not have the belarusian locale installed in
your system, you can compile it yourself. The source is
available at
the bellinux page.
Issue
localedef -f CP1251 -i be_BY be_BY.CP1251
or
localedef -f ISO-8899-5 -i be_BY be_BY.ISO-8899-5
to compile the locale in windows-1251 encoding or iso8859-5 encoding.
Check how it works by setting the locale
set LANG=be_BY.CP1251; export LANG
or
set LANG=be_BY.ISO-8859-5; export LANG
and running a locale-aware program like
date
or
cal.
Some cyrillic console fonts are in fact russian fonts and
lack many cyrillic characters. Fortunately, UniCyr fonts by
Vadinm Zhitnikov have all the glyphs from cp866, cp1251,
iso8859-5 and all printable symbols from koi8-r. Besides
the belarusian keyboard maps which you can find at the
the bellinux page
, other files are fairly standard and are available in most
linux distributions. To set up window-1251 in console,
There are two ways to set up Belarusian with iso-8859-5
Load iso-8859-5 font
consolechars -f iso05.f16
Load belarusian keymap
by2.kmap
or
by.kmap
loadkeys by.kmap
loadkeys by2.kmap
This method has one serious drawback - you will loose all
pseudographic characters and, say, you Midnight Commander
will look somewhat naked. The second method described below
preserves all pseudographic characters:
Load UniCyr font
consolechars -f UniCyr_8x16
Load by2.kmap
keymap or
by.kmap
loadkeys by.kmap
loadkeys by2.kmap
Load Application-Charset Map iso05.acm
consolechars -m iso05
Beware that different Linux distributions have different
console-related packages -
console-tools or
kbd. Abovementioned scripts are meant
to work with console-tools which is by
far more popular.
Install ISO-8859-5 fonts for X Window and make sure they are
before other fonts in the fontpath. Refer to
Font-HOWTO
for details on how to install fonts.
Get the belarusian keyboard layout by from the
the bellinux page
and put it on the place of any other keyborad layout in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/, e.g.
instead of the belgian keyboard layout
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/be
Put the following stings in your
/etc/X11/XF86COnfig:
Don't forget to set up the system locale to
be_BY.ISO8859-5 as described in Section 2.4.
You will also want to make sure that iso-8859-5 fonts
are before any other fonts in your font path.
Install ISO-8859-5 fonts for X Window and make sure they
are before other fonts in the fontpath.
Get the belarusian keyboard layout by from the
the bellinux page
and put it on the place of any other keyborad layout in
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/, e.g.
instead of the belgian keyboard layout
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/be
Put the following strings in your
/etc/X11/XF86Config:
Don't forget to set up the system locale to be_BY.CP1251
as described in Section 2.4.
To use windows-1251 with XFree 3.3.5 and 4.0, you have to
apply a patch from Aleksey Novodvorsky that allows the use
of windows-1251 with XKB. The original location is at
ftp.logic.ru/pub/logic/linux/be-locale
and it is also available from
the bellinux page.
Lucky users of Linux-Mandrake RE get a patched XFree86 out
of box.
Belarusian keyboard layout is palnned for all XFree releases
after 4.0.2. To make it work, you will have to add the
following lines
into /etc/X11/XF86Config: