Andrew Hamilton's Homepage

Linux on Alienware Area-51m 7700

Standard disclaimer: The information herein comes with no guarantee of any kind. Use at your own risk. If you find an error or can offer useful advice, feel free to email me (my email address is at the bottom of my homepage).

1. Hardware Specs
2. Introduction
3. Installation
3.1 Fedora fails
3.2 Gentoo succeeds
3.3 Hard disk
3.4 Gentoo installation
3.5 Ethernet
3.6 Compile the Kernel
3.7 /etc/make.conf
3.8 Sound
3.9 Video
3.10 DVD player
3.11 Superuser
3.12 /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
3.13 Hyperthreading
3.14 Desktop
3.15 Clock
3.16 Special keys
3.17 Modem
3.18 Internationalization
3.19 Mouse

1. Hardware Specs

% lspci 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 915G/P/GV Processor to I/O Controller (rev 04) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 915G/P/GV PCI Express Root Port (rev 04) 0000:00:1b.0 Class 0403: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 03) 0000:00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev d3) 0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FR (ICH6/ICH6R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 03) 0000:00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) IDE Controller (rev 03) 0000:00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03) 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV41.8 (rev a2) 0000:0a:00.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02) 0000:0a:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link) 0000:0a:02.0 RAID bus controller: Promise Technology, Inc. PDC20378 (FastTrak 378/SATA 378) (rev 02) 0000:0a:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)

2. Introduction

The folks at Alienware were eager to please. When I told them I planned to put linux on the machine, they responded that they did not support linux. When I told them I didn't need linux support (we have good linux support in house), and I don't want Windows support either, they said fine, and were willing to ship the laptop without any operating system installed. They even said they'd give me a $80 rebate for not using Windows (wow!).

When the machine arrived, sure enough when I turned it on, it said

Operating system not found

One possibility would be to use the linux dd option of the Fedora boot disk to load a driver disk with the new modules on it. Unfortunately, the new modules must be created from a patched kernel, and the patched modules prove to be incompatible with the kernel and modules on the Fedora disk.

Another possibilty would be to create a new Fedora boot disk with all the relevant files on it. Unfortunately, if you do all of that and try to do a network install of Fedora, then the install fails because the md5sum of the boot disk fails to match that of the network installation.

So our electronics shop took the disk out of the laptop, and bunged it into a desktop with an old-fashioned disk cable. We loaded Fedora on to the disk, compiled a kernel patched with the new sata_promise driver, took the disk out of the desktop, put it back in the laptop, started it up and ... boot panic.

Conclusion: installing Fedora was, as of the first half of Feb 2005, a mathematical impossibility. Maybe for you it will be different: perhaps by the time you read this Fedora will have incorporated the patches into the kernel, and for you all will be plain sailing.

3.2 Gentoo succeeds

By contrast, when you load the Gentoo boot disk, it puts you in a shell where you can poke around, look for disks, load modules. With Gentoo I loaded the needed sata_promise module, mounted the hard disk on /dev/sdb2, and saw the Fedora installation which had been impossible to access under Fedora. Gentoo one, Fedora zero.

For a while, I contemplated trying to fix up the Fedora installation inside a Gentoo environment. But I figured that would be asking for trouble. So Fedora got wiped out, and Gentoo got in.

Pleas to the open source developer:

• Empower the user.
• Don't hide what you do from the user. There are other operating systems that do that well enough.
• Provide an uninstall option. If you add a feature, give the user the power to remove it (easily).
• Don't reject user complaints as ignorant flames. Use them to build a faq of troubleshooting hints.
• Empower the user.

Gentoo is apparently not the only distribution that succeeds. Ivan Moore writes:

From: "Ivan E. Moore II"
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005

Out of the box...Ubuntu Linux 5.04 installs on the 7700.  I have pretty
much the exact setup as you.  I wanted to keep my existing Alienware XP
install so I broke the raid array, created 2 seperate ones (the respawn'd
XP croaks if it's not installed on a raided device I guess) and then
installed Ubuntu and it works.  Wireless...works...Video...out of the
box...only things I haven't tested so far is modem and audio.  Probably
have to customize my kernel for the audio and I doubt the modem will
work...ohh...and the issue you refer to with the mouse...don't have it.  I
have my USB mouse connected and the touchpad works as well...

I've never had a Linux install that has gone this well with this type of
hardware...

Ubuntu is Debian based which is also extremely nice.

Hope this helps you or someone else out.

Ivan

• IDE 0 [CD-ROM]
• IDE 1 [None]

1. USB FDC:
2. PCI SCSI: SATA378 TX2plus D0
3. IDE 0: _NEC DVD+/-RW ND-6550A-(P
4. IDE 1:
5. PCI LAN:
6. ...

The controller requires the new (Jan 05) sata_promise driver.

3.4 Gentoo installation

On another computer, burn the iso9660 image on to a cd using your favourite burn program, or from the command line with (change ATA:0,1,0 in the following to whatever is correct for your system, in accordance with the cdrecord documentation):

% cdrecord -dev=ATA:0,1,0 -v speed=8 -pad -data x86-installcd-minimal-2005.0-rc5.iso

Boot the Alienware Area-51m 7700 with the resulting Gentoo boot disk.

In my case, the hard disk showed up as /dev/sdb (not /dev/sda as it would later become), because the hard disk was the second scsi storage device that the Gentoo boot disk recognized. Later, when everything was installed, the hard disk would show up as /dev/sda, the first scsi storage device recognized during the boot process.

Partition the hard disk to your preference. I configured 96MB for /boot, 2GB for swap, and the rest for /. Here is my fdisk configuration:

Disk /dev/sdb: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 1 12 96358+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 13 11905 95530522+ 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 11906 12161 2056320 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Because the hard disk can show up as a different device (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, ...) depending on when it is recognized during boot up, it is sensible to make /etc/fstab refer to the disk with a label rather than as an absolute device, as in

LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 noatime 1 1 LABEL=/ / ext3 noatime 1 2 /dev/sda3 none swap sw 0 0

When you get to the point where the Gentoo Handbook tells you to make the filesystems (with mke2fs), you can attach labels to the /boot and / partitions with the -L option on mkfs.ext3 (an alias to mke2fs -j). Thus

% mkfs.ext3 -L /boot /dev/sdb1

% mkfs.ext3 -L / /dev/sdb2

Be careful: the mkfs.ext3 command destroys all information on the partition, so do not use it on a partition that already contains valuable data. To attach labels to /boot and / after the filesystems are made, use the tune2fs command, as in

% tune2fs -L /boot /dev/sdb1

% tune2fs -L / /dev/sdb2

In the near future you should be able similarly to label the swap partition with the -L option on mkswap

% mkswap -L /swap /dev/sda3 % swapon /dev/sda3

The -L option on mkswap has been implemented by RedHat, but is not yet in the Gentoo distribution. This is why the listing of /etc/fstab above refers to the swap device in absolute terms, as /dev/sda3. This will work as long as the hard disk remains the first scsi device recognized during the boot process. But it would be more robust to label the swap partition, and refer to the device in /etc/fstab as LABEL=/swap.

3.5 Ethernet

There are a bunch of other things that should (or should not) be compiled into the kernel. To shortcut the matter, here are my /usr/src/linux-2.6.10-gentoo-r6/.config and /usr/src/linux-2.6.12-gentoo-r4/.config files, tweaked to work specifically for the Alienware Area-51m 7700. Use at your risk and discretion.

Note that even though ACPI Power Management does not work, nevertheless various parts of the kernel do rely on ACPI, and ACPI must be compiled into the kernel.

Having compiled the kernel, you should install grub, again following the Gentoo Handbook. If you want the console (outside X) to have a sensible resolution and a cool background (as opposed to huge type and a black background), read the excellent Gentoo HOWTO fbsplash. The contents of my /boot/grub/grub.conf file look like this (July 05):

default=0 fallback=1 timeout=10 splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz title Gentoo Linux (2.6.12-r4) root (hd0,0) kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz-2.6.12-gentoo-r4 ro udev video=vesafb:ywrap,mtrr,1024x768-32@60 splash=verbose,theme:emergence initrd (hd0,0)/fbsplash-emergence-1024x768

3.7 /etc/make.conf

The -sse2 option overrides the default -i387 option. The i387 floating point convention is used by default in most chips, but it has some idiosynchracies which can lead to weird things in code. Chief among these idiosynchracies is that with i387 it is possible to arrive at <can you get here?> in the following code segment:

if (x != 0.) { ... <more lines of code> ... if (x == 0.) { <can you get here?>

The reason for this is that in the first if statement, if x has an underflowing value such as 1.e-400 and x is still in a register, then the if statement will evaluate x as being non-zero. Later in the code, if x has moved out of the register, then the underflowing value will have been set to zero, and the second if statement will evaluate x as being zero. More generally, the truth or falsity of a conditional involving floating point numbers depends on whether the numbers are in registers or not, which may in turn depend on extraneous factors such as the presence of other lines in the code. For example, with i387, in

x = y; if (x == y) { ...

the (x == y) conditional may evaluate to false!

3.8 Sound

The sound driver is compiled into the 2.6.12 kernel. When you compile the kernel, turn on

Device Drivers -> Sound -> Sound card support -> Advanced Linux Sound Architecture -> PCI Devices -> Intel HD Audio

You should also turn on the other kernel options recommended in the Gentoo Linux ALSA guide. Configuring the sound driver is now made easy by running

% alsaconf

After running alsaconf, you should find that /etc/modules.d/alsa contains the following line, among others:

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel

Do not leave around obsolete files such as /etc/modules.d/alsa.orig, because gentoo will look also in those files, and get confused.

Obsolete Feb 05 advice.

To make sound work, follow the excellent instructions in the Gentoo Linux ALSA guide. At the time I compiled (late Feb 05), the desired azx module was not yet in the kernel. If this is still true for you, then you will have to emerge alsa-driver as described in the guide. Note that each time you recompile the kernel, you will have to repeat emerge alsa-driver, because recompiling the kernel will cause the alsa modules to be overwritten.

First (I hope you are reading the Gentoo guide for detailed instructions), add to /etc/make.conf the following line:

ALSA_CARDS="azx"

After emerge alsa-driver in accordance with the Gentoo guide, add to /etc/modules.d/alsa the following line:

alias snd-card-0 snd-azx

and optionally other lines as suggested by the Gentoo guide.

End of obsolete Feb 05 advice.

As the Gentoo guide tells you, at some point you have to mute all the speakers. Don't forget that, after having followed the guide to the bitter end, you need to turn the speakers back on, which you can do using

% alsamixer

If your terminal is missing its beep, make sure that the pcspkr module is compiled into the kernel. To /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 add the line:

pcspkr

If you find the beep annoyingly loud, run alsamixer and turn the PC Speaker down to 1/2 volume.

Update July 05.

The ogle dvd player now works with the alsa audio driver.

Obsolete Mar 05 advice.

The ogle dvd player does not work with the alsa audio driver, exiting with the error message (among other messages)

ERROR[ogle_audio]: drain failed: Resource temporarily unavailable ALSA lib pcm_hw.c:535:(snd_pcm_hw_prepare) SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_PREPARE failed: Device or resource busy ERROR[ogle_audio]: prepare failed: Device or resource busy

However, ogle does work under oss emulation. Edit /usr/share/ogle/oglerc so that the audio device driver is specified as oss instead of alsa:

<audio> <device> <driver>oss

End of obsolete Mar 05 advice.

Programs like quake2 that require exclusive access to the audio card require

# Force 48k Hz % echo "quake2 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss # Disable recording % echo "quake2 0 0 disable" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss

You can undo this with

% echo "erase" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss % echo "erase" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0c/oss

See Quake 1 and modern linux, and Takashi Iwai's NOTES on kernel oss-emulation.

3.9 Video

The xorg.conf file requires a fair bit of tweaking to work. Here's my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The modelines

# Modelines for the native 16:10 LCD screen. # # 1280x800 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 49.68 kHz; pclk: 83.46 MHz ModeLine "1280x800" 83.46 1280 1344 1480 1680 800 801 804 828 # # 1680x1050 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 63.84 kHz; pclk: 144.02 MHz ModeLine "1680x1050" 144.02 1680 1784 1968 2256 1050 1051 1054 1064

are required to allow the LCD to run at 1680×1050 and 1280×800 resolutions.

If pam denies you permission to run X as an ordinary user (not superuser), then

% vigr

and add the user (yourself) to the video group. The nVidia documentation in /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/README suggests changing the permissions of the nvidia devices (chmod 0666 /dev/nvidia*), but this advice invites an ongoing battle with pam.

If you give presentations, you will want to implement support of an external projector. My xorg.conf file does this using the TwinView option of the nVidia driver. If you are having trouble getting an external projector to work, read the comments in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

If you find that applications like mplayer crash, then chances are that somehow some libraries got overwritten. Try re-emerging libraries, mplayer, and/or the nVidia driver. If you change /etc/make.conf, then you should re-emerge mplayer.

3.10 DVD player

Well, I was completely wrong about there being no driver that can change the settings on this drive. Sorry about that. When you compile the kernel, turn on

Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support -> Intel PIIXn chipsets support

To ensure that hdparm -d1 gets run on the CD/DVD drive at boot time, edit /etc/conf/hdparm to contain the following line

cdrom0_args="-d1"

and then

% rc-update add hdparm boot

Obsolete Mar 05 advice.

The video output from DVDs is choppy. The usual fix for this is to turn on dma with the hdparm utility:

% hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

Unfortunately with the _NEC DVD+/-RW ND-6500A ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive this command elicits the response

/dev/hda: setting using_dma to 1 (on) HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted using_dma = 0 (off)

which, as explained by DVD Playback HOWTO is not good.

More generally,

% hdparm /dev/hda

elicits

/dev/hda: HDIO_GET_MULTCOUNT failed: Invalid argument IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 0 (off) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument

As of writing (March 05) there does not appear to be any linux driver that can change the settings on this drive.

End of obsolete Mar 05 advice.

mplayer is a wonderful application that plays mpegs faster and smoother than any other (even the great and venerable xanim). However, I could not persuade mplayer to play dvds (whereas mplayer plays dvds fine on my dell laptop).

% mplayer -v dvd://1

produces

... Filename for url is now dvd://1 Unknown protocol 'dvd' Unable to open URL: dvd://1 vo: x11 uninit called but X11 not inited.. Exiting... (End of file)

Many postings on the web record the same problem, but so far no solution has been forthcoming. If you know the solution, please email me.

3.11 Superuser

An annoying feature of gentoo is that it does not implement a scheme that allows an ordinary user to halt or reboot the system. That makes sense of course - you probably don't want some arbitrary remote user to bring the system down. However, the user who owns the console has a special status, and they should be allowed to reboot or halt the system. RedHat provides a usermode package that implements consolehelper and userhelper commands that make this possible.

3.12 /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

Alternatively, remove nautilus from your installation. After removing nautilus, you may find that desktop backgrounds do not persist across sessions. If so, then in gconf-editor set

desktop->gnome->background->draw_background true

apps->nautilus->preferences->background_set false

apps->nautilus->preferences->show_desktop false

I am delighted to find that the feature-rich sawfish window-manager

% emerge x11-wm/sawfish % emerge x11-themes/sawfish-themes

still works under gnome, and that viewports and edge-flipping still work, although by default those capabilities are hidden from view. That is, not only are viewports and edge-flipping turned off, but the ability to turn them on is by default suppressed in the sawfish-ui sawfish configuration manager. My .sawfishrc file is as suggested by Making GNOME 2.2 Usable with Viewports. This is my customized .sawfish/custom file, some part of which appears necessary to complete the implementation of viewports and edge-flipping. Use the

% sawfish-ui

command to reconfigure sawfish to your taste. Here is the full list of options that can go in the .sawfishrc file.

gnome-terminal offers a pretty terminal window, but it has become horribly slow. If a high-performance graphics application that normally runs full screen at 30fps or 60fps writes diagnostic messages to a gnome-terminal at say one line per frame, then gnome-terminal will seriously slow the application, say by a factor of two. My guess is that one of the developers of gnome-terminal put in a sleep command after each line of output (so you can read it, right?). How else could a program that has to do so little run sooo slooowwww? Dumb, dumb, dumb. Workaround: revert to old-fashioned xterm when speed is critical.

My favourite fixed width font for terminals used to be miscfixed medium semicondensed 10, but gnome-terminal have removed that option (even if you take the precaution of explicitly putting FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc/:unscaled" at the top of the list of fonts in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file). A good alternative is LucidaTypewriter 9. For some strange reason choosing LucidaTypewriter Regular with Edit->Current Profile from the gnome-terminal Menubar, gives LucidaTypewriter Bold instead of LucidaTypewriter Regular. The workaround is to fire up gconf-editor, choose apps->gnome-terminal->profiles->default, and set font to LucidaTypewriter 9.

If xscreensaver is left running, then sooner or later it will freeze the computer, requiring a hard reboot (press the off button). The web is full of messages from people recounting the same problem, and no one seems to have a good answer except to guess that the OpenGL configuration is wrong. Well, that ain't so, because I have OpenGL apps that run for ages without crashing the system. Solution:

% emerge --unmerge xscreensaver

It is possible that it is one particular screensaver application that crashes xscreensaver. If you take the time to figure out which one is the mole, email me.

Even with xscreensaver removed, the computer will, after some period of inactivity, first blank its screen, then put itself into suspend (or something), even if a program is running in background, and even if the computer is plugged into the A/C mains. This is not polite of course, because without APM or ACPI support, a suspend is equivalent to hanging the computer. I think it is xset() that is doing the dirty, The fix is to put the following into your /etc/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags" # Turn off any Power Management events. Option "NoPM" "true" # # Following set xset() values. 0 means infinite. # # Minutes of inactivity before screen blanks. Option "BlankTime" "0" # Minutes of inactivity before DPMS standby. Option "StandbyTime" "0" # Minutes of inactivity before DPMS suspend. Option "SuspendTime" "0" # Minutes of inactivity before DPMS off. Option "OffTime" "0" EndSection

The panel battery applet (/usr/libexec/battstat-applet-2) requires the apmd library to run

% emerge apmd

It is not necessary to compile APM support into the kernel, and indeed if APM is compiled into the kernel it will be ignored because APM is not implemented for multi-processing (smp) kernels. If the battery applet is started and the apmd library is not installed, then gnome returns the misleading message

The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:GNOME_BattstatApplet". Details: Failed to resolve, or extend '!prefs_key=/apps/panel/profiles/default/applets/applet_5/prefs;background=none:;orient=up;size=x-small;locked_down=false

Though gnome tries to hide what it is doing from the user (sadly), it is possible to find out what is really going on by running directly the command

% /usr/libexec/battstat-applet-2

which elicits the message

/usr/libexec/battstat-applet-2: error while loading shared libraries: libapm.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

which reveals what the real problem is.

3.15 Clock

Similarly, the "email" and "web" special keys near the on/off switch are soft keys, and you can program them to do what you want.

3.17 Modem

Thanks to Thomas Dilts for pointing out http://www.lazy8.nu/delld180/DebianLinuxOnDellLattitude810laptop.html#step13 that http://www.linuxant.com/ offer a partly free driver that works.

However, I have an old EigerCom 56K PCMCIA modem that works fine.

Neither gnome-ppp nor wvdial was able to configure the modem set up correctly, and gentoo documentation is silent. (Incidentally, wvdial creates a world-readable file /etc/wvdial.conf containing your modem password, so after emerge --unmerge wvdial make sure to clean up after wvdial by deleting /etc/wvdial.conf). So I plagiarized my old redhat modem configuration and pppd script, modifying them to the gentoo environment. For gentoo, the ppp0 configuration file is /etc/conf.d/net.ppp0, and other relevant files and scripts are in the /etc/ppp directory. The core thing that a dialout script does is run the ppp daemon pppd with a suitable set of arguments, such as

% /usr/sbin/pppd updetach /dev/modem 115200 remotename ppp0 modem crtscts asyncmap 00000000 defaultroute mru 2048 mtu 2048 connect /usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/ppp/chat-ppp0

You should not run this directly, but rather create or plagiarize a script that does it for you. To debug what is happening, run (as superuser)

% tail -f /var/log/messages

Gentoo puts the login and password in /etc/conf.d/net.ppp0, but the more usual, potentially more secure (encryptable) approach is to put these in the pap or chap secrets file /etc/ppp/pap-secrets or /etc/ppp/chap-secrets (whichever protocol the remote server uses), as described by the pppd(8) man page. You must create a file /etc/ppp/peers/callname containing the lines

noauth name <login_name>

where, as described in the pppd(8) documentation, <login_name> is the name in the /etc/ppp/pap-secrets or /etc/ppp/chap-secrets file. For security,

% chown root:dialout /etc/ppp/peers/callname % chmod 640 /etc/ppp/peers/callname

You should be able to dial out as an ordinary user, not as root. To do this, you should (as superuser)

% vigr

and add yourself to the dialout group.

To allow cardmgr to set up the serial port consistently on the modem, install setserial:

% emerge setserial

Update July 05.

It appears that whatever it is that attempts to change group ownership of the modem to dialout no longer succeeds. I think this is a gentoo thing, something to do with udev(8). The workaround is to

% vigr

and add the user (yourself) to the tty group.

3.18 Internationalization

• HOWTO Create an UTF-8 enabled system
• Using UTF-8 with Gentoo (which states incorrectly that tcsh does not support utf8).

To implement international characters, even simple 8-bit latin1 iso88591 characters, there's a bunch of things to do. First, you must compile appropriate native language support into the kernel (File systems -> Native Language Support). I set the default NLS option to utf8, compiled Codepage 437 (United States, Canada) and ASCII (United States) directly into the kernel, and turned on everything else as a module (heck, why not). Next, in gentoo, make sure that the USE flag in /etc/make.conf contains the nls parameter.

To find out what your current locale is defined to be, run

% locale

To see what locales are available, run

% locale -a

In gentoo, you define your preferred locale by editing /etc/env.d/02locales to contain lines such as

LANG=en_US LC_CTYPE=en_US.iso88591

Having done so, update your environment with

% env-update

If you use the tcsh shell, as I do, then, as explained on the tcsh(1) man page, to implement utf8 characters it is necessary to compile tcsh with KANJI and DSPMBYTE defined. To do this in gentoo, make sure that the USE flag in your /etc/make.conf contains the cjk parameter. Then

% emerge tcsh

You may also find it necessary to set the dspmbyte shell variable. To do this (see http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=89549) edit /etc/profile.d/tcsh-settings to include an additional case *UTF-8 in the LANG switch, as in

switch ( ${LANG:r} ) case *UTF-8: set dspmbyte=utf8 breaksw

Voilà! You have access to 8-bit characters.

Though probably somewhat out of date,

• Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO-12

Updated 20 July 2005