Hm, I am talking about kernel system calls, I didn't think the locale is involved here.
With "unicode" I mean one of the 4 states for the console after

Code:

man 4 console_ioctl

which are:

Code:

K_RAW
K_XLATE
K_MEDIUMRAW
K_UNICODE

You can set these with the

Code:

ioctl KDSKBMODE

Unicode just means that the kernel console driver will handle characters as two bytes long (unsigned short).

The values I am talking about I acquired through the KDGKBENT ioctl, like this:

Code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <linux/keyboard.h>
#include <sys/ioctl.h>
#include <sys/kd.h>

int
main(int argc, char **argv) {
  struct kbentry ke;
  
  ke.kb_table = (unsigned char)atoi(argv[1]);
  ke.kb_index = (unsigned char)atoi(argv[2]);
  ioclt(0, KDGKBENT, &ke);
  printf("keycode %u = %04x\n", ke.kb_index, ke.kb_value);
  return 0;
}

If you compile this program and invoke it with the first parameter as one of the above mentioned 256 keymap tables, and the second parameter as your keycode, it will print the corresponding value.
You can use showkey(1) to get a keycode from your keyboard (it doesn't work while in X I assume)

E.g. When I press 'a' during showkey(1) I get the keycode 40, if I then invoke my program like

Code:

./a.out 0 40

I get

Code:

keycode 40 = 0b61

Where 0061 would be the utf-8 (and ascii) representation of 'a', if I use 1 instead of 0 I get 0b41, where 0041 would be capital letter 'A'

This should all be independent of the locale, it depends on the defined keymap(5)

Now I am wondering what the 0x0b is doing there, it could be the KT_LOCK function (defined in linux/keyboard.h), but then I am wondering why it is not 0xfb, because functions need to be greater than 0xf000, or so I thought.

I hope you are seeing where I am getting at, my in- and output on the console is jut fine, I am only wondering about the internals.

Regarding this, this is the most interesting link I have found so far: (The part I am interested in starts at section: "Key maps in the kernel")
h**p://gunnarwrobel.de/wiki/Linux-and-the-keyboard.html


But for what it's worth, here my locale output:

Code:

LANG=de_DE.utf8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.utf8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.utf8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.utf8"
LC_ALL=

regards.