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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.


Links2 graphical also works WITHOUT changing the console font or the X 
font - apparently Cyrillic is built in.  (There is no code setting, and 
the Language setting in links affects only the menus). I tested with 
delilinux links2 in BL2 X, and with links2 that I compiled in svgalib 
mode.  This is by far the simplest route.  You can turn off images to save 
memory and download time and still view Russian in Cyrillic (http://pravda.ru).


To view Russian Cyrillic in X or console mode with nongraphical links1 or 
links2 you must first load a Cyrillic font and then in SETUP change 
Code to KOI8-R (save the change).


In X start them from an rxvt that was loaded with a Cyrillic font (I could
edit the jwm menu, but I tested by starting another rxvt from the original 
one - rxvt -fn cyr).

I added one 6x13 Cyrillic font to the X misc fonts (and edited fonts.dir 
and fonts.alias to match).  Choose a font size appropriate to your 
resolution.


To view Russian with links1 or links2 in console mode setfont and then
choose Code KOI8-R.

> 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.

Links2 has built-in fonts so the console font is irrelevant.
It works at pravda.ru but will not view the Russian html readme or text 
which are coded cp866 and came with the Russian fonts package.
Lynx works at pravda.ru if you set to cp866.

> There are other koi8 and koi8r and u fonts in kbd.tgz but I must have
> preferred the looks of this one. 
The 'u' vowel is wrong in all of these.

The Languages listed in Setup are all European or Slavic.  Links2 may 
include only two char sets, Latin (with assorted diacritics) and Cyrillic.

Serbian (Cyrillic or Latin) and Macedonian appear correctly.  So does 
Polish, Albanian, French, German and Portuguese and even Greek.

A Turkish site did not display in links2 -g with the proper diacritics but 
the menu uses them.  I think Turkish uses a different iso-8859-n than the 
rest of Europe.

Links2 does not do Chinese or Japanese (I see asterisks instead).

Links2 svgalib segfaults frequently.  It should behave better in X.

The Cyrillic fonts come with detailed instructions - I can try installing 
the whole set of them in case Opera needs them all (unlike text-based 
programs where one font is enough). Or let the user read Russian in links 
and use Opera in English.

Sindi