The Linux Console Tools

The Linux Console Tools is a set of tools allowing a Linux user to set up his/her console's behaviour. This does not include X11 features, which use a different mechanism, although I have some plans to share the keymap definitions from X11.

The package can be seen as 4 sets of tools:

Keyboard tools

These allow to setup the keyboard, and get informations about its current state.

Screen-font tools

These allow to setup the font to be displayed on-screen, and get informations about the current one.

Virtual-terminal tools

These handle the Virtual Terminals (also known as Virtual Consoles).

Font-file tools

These are tools that allow one to manipulate the miscellaneous file-formats used to store console fonts.

A detailed introduction to console issues is available on this site, as well as in the package itself.

The version numbering is like that of the Linux kernel: a major version number, a sub-version number whose parity tells whether the release is a stable (eg. 0.2.0) or development one (eg. 1.3.2), and a patch-level.

Evolution

This package was originally based on version 0.94 of the standard kbd package maintained by Andries Brouwer, because at that time I had much more time to work on this than Andries to look at what I was doing, and he has not done much to ease integration of new features back into kbd.

It has since continued to evolve (although not always as quickly as some may have wished), thanks to users and contributors who sent me feadback, many updates for data files, as well as a number of patches. These contributions are pushing me to keep working on this software - thanks to all.

Since release 0.2.0, it is now in sync with version 0.99 of kbd, and has many additionnal features.