I'm trying to get all french accents to work in gentoo, so far everything works fine when in X/gnome, i type "setxkbmap ca" to load the french canadian keys and i'm able to type éàèÉéééÈ etc...

however when I switch to TTY console mode (ctrl-alt-F2 for example), i am only able to obtain è and none of the others like éà etc...

I know that in TTY the command loadkeys is responsible for the character set and does not affect gnome in X which leads me to believe I need to fiddle with loadkeys command, however I tried all instances of the french keymaps found in /usr/share/keymaps/i386/ by issuing "loadkeys fr","loadkeys fr-latin1", etc.. I tried them all, one of them was able to give me the accents I'm missing but didnt correspond to the keys on my keyboard (microsoft wired 500 series)..

my locales are set according to the gentoo localisation guide, echo $LANG outputs en_US.UTF-8 because I wish to keep my system prompts in english (I also tried setting to to french without success in the accents)

If anyone has suggestions on what else to look at or try it would be nice.

Regards,

To select font displayed on the console use command:
You can choose another font file, as I known files starting with "Uni" contain Unicode format, but maybe other also works. You can also create symlink in this directory to your default font named "default.psf.gz". I don't know how to instruct linux to load it automatically, without using bashrc.

If you will get two chars after one keystroke then you must set console to work in unicode by:

That didn't work, I don't have Uni3-TerminusBoldVGA16.psf.gz this file, but tried the other 4-5 files in that directory without success, I also tried unicode_start.

I noticed that when I boot from a resscuecd that I have and type loadkeys cf all the keys work fine in TTY, I'm trying to see what settings are different from my system and the live cd.

any ideas? i did an output of locale and LANG so far on both systems

** solved

I fixed the problem, i created 2 scripts, one to turn the french accents on and one to turn them off

french.sh

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/setxkbmap ca
/usr/bin/loadkeys cf


and

english.sh

#!/bin/bash

/usr/bin/setxkbmap us
/usr/bin/loadkeys us


I run both as administrator in gnome and they enable/disable french accents in both TTY and X environments without any problems, including vim and openoffice

Regards.