The future of the console driver and of the Linux Console Tools

The Linux Console Tools were derived from kbd. It is not a good thing to have two distinct distributions for these tools, so we once hoped we'd manage to finally merge the two packages back, together with Andries Brouwer, who still maintains kbd. However, due to the growing gap with kbd, lack of time, and such things, this project has not progressed much till now. Although major distributions like RedHat 6.0 and Debian 2.2 (not released yet) have moved from kbd to the Linux Console Tools, development on kbd is still alive, and it's a pain to keep in sync.

The driver in 2.2.x kernel has been reworked a lot, and it seems it will continue to evolve in 2.3.x. There are already some new features, such as fonts with width != 8, which will be supported in the future (Note: support for arbitrary width is implemented in the Linux Console Tools but mostly untested at this date).

There is an ongoing project, known as GGI (for General Graphical Interface), which is in the process of, among other things, revolutionarize the way the console is handled. Have a look at their WWW site for details.

As far as possible, I will try to keep the Linux Console Tools in sync with what is developped for the kernel, and to what gets added to new releases of kbd but I have to look better at the current state of the GGI project before I give any more info.