I have debian lenny command line installation, I am trying to print polish characters to the command line and I have a Turkish QWERTY keyboard.
If I use dpkg-reconfigure console-data
and select pc/qwertz/polish/standard/standard as keyboard layout, instead of ć and ż, console displays diamond ascii code. So I went ahead and changed the default locale to pl_PL using
dpkg-reconfigure locales
then it started to display some weird characters like upside down question mark instead of ć and ż.
On another lenny machine which has graphical user interface, a similar keyboard displays these accented characters fine if I change keyboard preferences to Polish qwertz.
What else can I do to make polish characters work in command line only interface?
I figured it out, You need to use iso02g font to make your console display polish specific characters, and you need to make sure that your locale is set to ISO-8859-2. And in the console-data you need to make sure that you selected poland qwertz keyboard. This way your polish keyboard will be able to enter all those special accented characters and console will display them just fine. To change the font you need to browse to /etc/console-tools, edit config file and change all the lines that start with Screen_FONT and update the value to iso02g.