The following topics are addressed:

     1) THE OUTPUT ON THE CONSOLE
   1.1) The font is broken after I switch to X and back to the console
   1.2) The screen size is wrong.  The buttom 2-3 lines are cut off
   1.3) How can I load the big fonts?
   1.4) How to enlarge the image on the screen of my laptop?
   1.5) The symbols on the screen of my LCD are ugly

     2) THE INPUT ON THE CONSOLE
   2.1) I cannot type any non-ASCII character.  How do I fix the keymap?
   2.2) Where is the Dvorak keyboard?
   2.3) Why does CapsLock work as ShiftLock?


1) THE OUTPUT ON THE CONSOLE

1.1) The font is broken after I switch to X and back to the console

   Actually the boot-time font replaces the font of console-setup.  In
   most cases this means the non-ASCII symbols are replaced by some
   other funny symbols.

   This happens because sometimes the X video driver is unable to
   restore properly the state of the console when you switch from X to
   text-mode.  How severe the problem is depends on the combination
   Video-card/X-driver you use.

   Notice that all this can happen only if the console is in
   text-mode, i.e. you are not using framebuffer.  If you add to
   /etc/modules the kernel module for framebuffer you will be able to
   switch from X to console whenever you want and the font will never
   be broken.

   Sometimes the problem doesn't exists at all.  It is rumored that
   some old video adapters (more than 10 years old) fall in this
   category but I have never seen such videocard.

   The most common case seams to be that the state at the time the X
   server is started is remembered.  Try to setup the console before X
   Window is started and if the problem disappears then you are in
   this category.  The problem will reappear if you change the console
   setup while X Window is already started.  All video adapters I have
   had are in this category.

   And sometimes the console setup is never remembered.  In this case
   you will have to use framebuffer (try "modprobe vga16fb").  Another
   uption is to to use the "setupcon" utility whenever you need to
   restore the console setup and hope that the problem will be fixed
   in some future version of X Window.  You may want to send a bug
   report to the X developers.

   Some chipsets might require specific video driver options in order
   to restore all console settings correctly. For example, if you
   selected any font size other than 16 for console, it is necessary
   to add the following line into "Device" section of xorg.conf when
   using i810 driver with some integrated graphics controllers:

      Option "VBERestore" "true"

   Please, read 'man i810' (or 'man <your driver name>') for
   additional information and, more importantly, for warnings on using
   the options.

 
1.2) The screen size is wrong.  The buttom 2-3 lines are cut off

   The reason and the fix of the problem are the same as in the
   previous question.  I suppose you use X Window and you set on the
   console a font whose size is not the same as the size of the font
   that was active when X Window was started.  Then the following
   happens:

      1. When X Window is started the X server remembers the active
         font (let this be font A).

      2. You use the Ctrl+Alt+F1 combination and then you change the
         font on the console (let this be font B).  However the X
         server doesn't want to know about this.

      3. You return to X (Alt+F7).

      4. Again Ctrl+Alt+F1.  The X server restores font A.  However
         the kernel doesn't know that B is no more the active font.

      5. If font A has say 16 scan lines and font B has 14 scan lines
         the font on the screen has 16 scan lines but the kernel
         doesn't know this and draws the screen as if the scan lines
         were only 14.  The result is that the bottom lines are
         outside the screen.


1.3) How can I load the big fonts?

   First, "consolechars" can not load big font.  But most current
   systems use "setfont" and "setfont" can load big fonts.

   Second, the big fonts require framebuffer.  This is hardware
   limitation.  The old 8514 videostandard had special text mode with
   12x20 fonts but I suppose this video mode is not supported by the
   kernel and it is unlikely that you own such video adapter anyway.

   Third, the big fonts can not be used with some of the framebuffer
   drivers.  For example on my computer if I use matroxfb then all
   font sizes work.  However if I use vga16fb instead of matroxfb
   then, all fonts load with no error messages but only the fonts with
   size 14, 16 or 32x16 are displayed correctly.


1.4) How to enlarge the image on the screen of my laptop?

   Many laptops do not scale the screen when the resolution is less
   than the resolution of the display.  And since the resolution of
   the default text-mode is much lower than the resolution of the LCD
   of the laptop (text mode: 720x400, LCD: at least 1024x768), only
   the central part of the screen is used.

   There are two ways to fix this.  The first is to reconfigure the
   laptop to scale the image and to use the whole screen.  For many
   laptops there is corresponding setting in the BIOS.

   The second way is to use some high resolution framebufer mode in
   combination with some of the large fonts of console-setup.  The
   drawback is that the screen will be slow.


1.5) The symbols on the screen of my LCD are ugly

   The resolution of the text-mode is much lower than the resolution
   of your LCD and because of that your LCD has to scale the image.
   Unfortunately many LCD do not do this job well.

   How well your LCD will perform in text mode doesn't depend much of
   its price but rather by the company that produced it.  Before you
   buy an LCD you may want to check how it performs in text mode.

   In order to fix this problem use high resolution framebuffer mode
   in combination with some of the large fonts of console-setup.  This
   way you will have a slow but excellent and impressive screen.


2) THE INPUT ON THE CONSOLE

2.1) I cannot type any non-ASCII character.  How do I fix the keymap?

   In most cases the keymap does not need a fix.

   Are you sure that you have correct locale?  For example if you use
   ISO-8859-1 in Denmark, then the LANG environment variable should
   have value "da_DK".  With some distributions you also have to set
   the LC_ALL environment variable.

   Are you sure also that your command interpreter accepts non-ASCII
   symbols?  Can you enter these characters in X in terminal emulator?
   If not, then try to make a file ~/.inputrc with the following
   contents:

      set meta-flag on
      set convert-meta off
      set output-meta on


2.2) Where is the Dvorak keyboard?

   The Dvorak layouts are variants of the national layouts.  For
   example if you want to use the Norwegian variant of the Dvorak
   layout, use 

      XKBLAYOUT="no"
      XKBVARIANT="dvorak"

   in /etc/default/console-setup.


2.3) Why does CapsLock work as ShiftLock?

   Yes, this happens if your working encoding is UTF-8.  Unfortunately
   due to bugs in the kernel and possibly in loadkeys also, when the
   console is in Unicode mode, CapsLock doesn't work for the non-ASCII
   letters.  That is why we decided to use ShiftLock instead of
   CapsLock.  This solution works for all letters but unfortunately it
   works also for non-letters, i.e. it swaps also 2 and @, 3 and #,
   etc.  We hope the kernel developers will find a better solution of
   this problem.

   When the console is not in UTF-8 mode CapsLock works as it should.
