"Sheshadrivasan B" wrote on 2005-03-16 07:21 UTC:
> I need to know if Linux kernel 2.4.20 supports internationalization.
There is almost nothing in terms of i18n and very little in terms of
character encodings that is of concern to the kernel. Practically all
this happens at the library level and above. In particular, the
kernel remains ignorant of the locale settings chosen by the user.
Noteworthy exceptions:
- The "cooked mode" in the tty driver needs to know when UTF-8 is used
to handle the delete/erase key correctly. Support for this was added
in an early 2.6 kernel and UTF-8 remains the only multi-byte character
set the kernel is aware of.
- There has been rather primitive UTF-8 support (ISO 10646 Level 1 with up to
512 glyphs) in the text-mode console driver of Linux for almost a decade.
- There have been filename encoding conversion facilities in the VFAT and NTFS
drivers for many years.
All of these are issues that the average user of a graphical Linux
desktop is hardly ever going to encounter in practice.
Nevertheless, the Linux distributions that are particularly renown for
their good internationalization support are all using the 2.6 kernel
today and they all use UTF-8 locales by default. If you are using an
older 2.4-kernel-based distribution, the libraries and tool that come
with it are very likely to be at least a year behind the state of the
art in i18n matters.
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
