Actual Reality

Although it’s no problem to view Japanese/Unicode characters on an X11 console like xterm or Konsole, it can be difficult to view them in the Linux virtual terminal. That’s where JFBTERM comes into view. It provides Japanese and other special character output using the framebuffer.

Ubuntu provides a prebuilt package in the repositories; to install it execute

sudo apt-get install jfbterm

It is also helpful to install a good font for it to use:

sudo apt-get install unifont

Now, provided that you have a working framebuffer, you can start it by running jfbterm.

If you receive an error about /dev/fb0 not present, you need to enable a framebuffer. In Ubuntu, modify the current kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst to include vesafb. For example, my section in menu.lst reads something like:

title Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-9
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-9 root=/dev/hda1 ro vesafb:mtrr,ywrap vga=0x318
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-9
quiet

After making the modification, reboot the system and try running jfbterm again.

Once you have jfbterm running, you can run commands like usual, and now should be able to see Japanese characters properly.