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I am setting up a 300MHz computer with 96MB RAM and BL3 for a recent 
Russian immigrant who wants to do email (in English - fastmail account 
with any browser), read Russian news with some browser.  And xfreecell so 
she can play solitaire.  No need to write Russian, just read it.  Her 
daughter thought she would need MS wordprocessor to write email, which 
implies that she is used to Windows but I am going to try her with linux 
first since I hate Windows and it runs much much slower.
Free dialup internet.

links2 graphical works in Russian with Russian console font added first.
(The svgalib version I compiled worked in BL3, and the delilinux X version 
in BL2 - glibc, so presumably Steven's X version with SSL will work in 
BL3).

You need three files from kbd.tgz

/usr/bin/setfont
/usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/u - the unicode mapping
/usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/Cyr_a8x16.gz

setfont Cyr_a8x16 -u /usr/lib/kbd/consolefonts/u
The mapping is wrong without this last part.

(If you add it, showfont will confirm that you have the font loaded)

This is koi8-r - Russian Cyrillic only - in which lower-case characters 
are interrupted by box characters and followed by math symbols.
Other Cyrillic charsets are cp866 (used by DOS, keeps the Cyrillic 
characters together), iso-8859-5 (also works with other Slavic languages), 
and the Windows CP set.  There are modified koi8-u for Ukrainian.
This font worked at pravda.ru with links2, even though I had to set lynx 
to cp866 to display the page properly.  Links2 can apparently convert 
automatically.

There are other koi8 and koi8r and u fonts in kbd.tgz but I must have 
preferred the looks of this one.  Also iso05 (iso-8859-5).

I have links2 set up to use mplayer for streaming audio and was able to 
listen to a few Russian radio stations (English hits, Italian opera, and 
some really awful Russian-language rock music) but most of the links were 
broken for the 16-32K stations.  I will probably skip sound for now and 
use the one ISA slot for a hardware modem instead.

Links2 cannot handle much javascript so I tried to add Opera too.

I downloaded a bunch of Russian-only koi8 X pcf fonts and copied one of 
them to the X fonts misc directory, added a line to fonts.dir (and added 1 
to the number on the first line) and to fonts.alias to describe them 
(called it cyr) and was able to load Xvesa with that font.

I set Opera to use detect automatically or to use koi-R but it still shows 
? ? ?  for all the Cyrillic characters.

The installation directions assume you have a configuration file to which 
you can add FontPath, but I already put these fonts in the misc directory 
which is on the path.  You can compress to pcf.gz.

Console is so much simpler.

Sindi Keesan