Unix Spell Book

UNIX-likes

Warning: this section not covers X-Window specific things, look at X-Window section instead.

Hint 1: if you want to browse Windows-created (CP1251) pages on your Unix (KOI8-R) operating system, just use latest Lynx version or on-line browsing decoders.
Hint 2: if you want to automatically decode incoming E-mail messages marked with windows-1251 or UTF-8 charsets to KOI8-R, use procmail script for that.

Console Fonts:

Keyboard & Screen Drivers:

Charset Converters:

Proxy:

  • CyrProxy , Cyrillic transcoder for network protocols.
    It allows transcode text-based tcp protocols from/to following Cyrillic text coding standards: CP866 (DOS), Macintosh, ISO, KOI8 (UNIX), CP1251 (Windows).

Locales:

Applicable Software:

Software Tuning:

Emacs tuning:
Emacs 19.33 KOI8-R configuration file, changes for new Emacs versions by Victor Kolossov <kolosov@vx.itep.ru>
Lynx tuning:
Go to 'o'ptions screen and check the following settings: 
display (C)haracter set      : KOI8-R character set
preferred document c(H)arset : koi8-r;q=1.0,windows-1251;q=0.5
If you can't see a Russian (KOI8-R) WWW page properly with Lynx, this means that the page is broken. As a workaround, in latest Lynx versions in the same options screen press '^A' and choose koi8-r if you think the page looks a like (big letters mostly) or windows-1251 as most common case too (small letters mostly). For older Lynx versions press '@' (turn raw mode on).
Sendmail 9 tuning:
to prevent auto-encoding to BASE64 be sure that following line present in your configuration.mc file: 
define(`confEIGHT_BIT_HANDLING', `pass8')dnl
Fetchmail tuning:
this program is 8bit clean by default excepting rare cases when buggy MUAs specify Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit but actually have 8bit characters in the mail body. To not strip 8bit for such cases too add pass8bits option to your ~/.fetchmailrc.
Mutt tuning:
Add 
set allow_8bit
set charset="koi8-r"
directives to your ~/.muttrc or to system-wide Muttrc. For new mutt versions, add 
set send_charset="us-ascii:koi8-r"
too. If you have sendmail version equal or greater than 8, add 
set use_8bitmime
Pine tuning:
in (S)ETUP, (C)ONFIGURE mode set enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiations, enable-8bit-nntp-posting and pass-control-character-as-is. Then select character-set, set it to KOI8-R and save/exit setup.

NOTE: You need to apply this patch #1 to fix following problems:

  • Pine converts all messages bigger than 3K and with 8bit characters amount bigger than 30% to QP or BASE64.
  • Pine always converts mail piped to external delivery agent (via sendmail-path= setting) to QP or BASE64.

Pine doesn't show the Capital Hard Sign 'Ъ' in some situations, use this patch #2 to fix it.

Elm tuning:
in your ~/.elm/elmrc file, set 
charset = KOI8-R
displaycharset = KOI8-R
Tin tuning:
set environment variable MM_CHARSET to KOI8-R and comment out mm_charset variable from ~/.tin/tinrc or just set mm_charset variable from ~/.tin/tinrc to KOI8-R (it overrides MM_CHARSET environment variable if present).

For new Tin versions mm_charset variable renamed to mm_network_charset and you also need to add 

scope=relcom*
undeclared_charset=KOI8-R

scope=fido*
undeclared_charset=KOI8-R
lines to your ~/.tin/attributes
IrcII tuning:
add following lines to your ~/.ircrc: 
/set translation russian
/set eight_bit_characters on
MySQL tuning:
this mysql patch (from Alex Povolotsky) adds a feature: auto recoding from/to CP1251, see README inside for more info.
Printing in KOI8-R:
страничка koi8 postscript fonts описывает настройку Ghostscript в KOI8-R для эмуляции postscript-принтера, установку KOI8-R Type1 шрифтов для XFree86, печать по-русски из Netscape, русификацию StarOffice и ApplixWare.