RUSSIAN_TUTOR: How to configure your system to read and write Cyrillic text.
v0015.2 [2009-10-20]

This text contains information by:
Aleksej R. Serdyukov, 2:5020/1042.42 (all my contributions here may be used
under GNU FDL 1.2+, GNU GPL 2+ or CC BY-SA 3.0)
Anatoly Kovalenko, 2:5020/1042.46, http://antol.msk.ru/
Paul Gorodyansky, http://RusWin.net/

The default character encoding in most modern GNU/Linux distributions that
work with the Russian language is UTF-8. Some people still prefer 8-bit
encodings like KOI8-R or KOI8-U.
Russian FidoNet uses the "DOS alternative" codepage 866 (CP866) almost
exclusively as of 2008. It is used in MS-DOS, MS Windows' text mode and OS/2
(eCS).
Microsoft Windows GUI uses CP1251, Windows NT GUI uses UTF-16.
WWW uses UTF-8, KOI8-R and CP1251.
Some Cyrillic-aware FidoNet news gates use KOI8 for the news side.

== Unix-like ==

These instructions may be common for many GNU/Linux distributions and other
Unix-like systems.

=== Debian GNU/Linux 3.0-4.0 ===

==== X11 ====

/etc/X11/xorg.conf (XF86Config in case of XFree86):

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "keyboard"
        Option          "CoreKeyboard"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc101"
>       Option          "XkbLayout"     "gb,ru"
        Option          "XkbOptions"    "grp:caps_toggle,grp_led:caps"
EndSection

The needed line is marked with ">". "gb" is the UK English layout. You can
have up to 4 layouts in the list (subsequent ones are ignored).

You will most likely be using a UTF-8 locale like "en_GB.UTF-8", but KOI8-R or
KOI8-U would also work for this purpose.

==== text mode ====

apt-get install console-cyrillic

Then you can change the character encoding using "cyr -e "
command.

There may be an issue with typing in Lenny as of 2008 though: ht
p://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=496181


== DOS, Windows, OS/2 ==

=== DOS and Microsoft Windows text mode ===

You can get a Cyrillic driver / codepage switcher, like one of these:

USSR.COM by Podstreshnyi A. K. - v3.4.13 from 1996.
Requires 800b to 17Kb of memory. Turn on/off showing of cyrillics by
RCtrl-RShift, turn on/off typing cyrillics by RCtrl, pseudographics by RShift.

KEYRUS - the most popular one.
http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Gurtyak/#Programs

RK.COM

Microsoft Windows also includes a program called mode.com.

=== Microsoft Windows and Windows NT GUI ===

To read/write Russian in Win XP/2003 do the following:

Start -> Control Panel -> Regional and language options:
Languages: Details -> Add -> Russian
Advanced: Select the language to match the language version of non-Unicode
programs you want to use -> Russian. NB! This changes the codepage for all
non-Unicode programs, so if you use German or any other non-English programs,
they will look not so good. This is not needed for web browsing.

For Win 98/ME/2000: Control Panel -> Keyboard -> Languages -> Add -> Russian.
For Unicode programs (see the earlier note before this!) press "Set default".
For Windows 95/98/ME, see also http://RusWin.net/cyr9x.htm

After these steps Russian programs such as Test Znaniy begin to show Russian
letters. These modifications don't affect the visibility of English letters.

See also: http://RusWin.net/


=== OS/2 and eComStation ===

Using Warp 3 with fixpak 35 and higher, or Warp 4, or anything newer, you can
just choose "RU441" keyboard layout in Selective Install.

Otherwise, change two lines in CONFIG.SYS to
CODEPAGE=866,850
DEVINFO=KBD,RU441,O:\OS2\KEYBOARD.DCP

The "850" means that you can switch to CP850 in the current session using CHCP.

A better layout switcher is Keybmon - you will have to patch some files and
delete some other files to disable the default switching mechanism. Info about
it will be added here just when you ask it.


When configured correctly, this should read "TECT": ’…‘’.

--- 
 * Origin: Delete Software Limited, Moscow, Russia (2:5020/1042.42)