but I have no idea how to make any of this available to the system. I have hunted extensively through www and have found plenty of sites but no comprehensible information.
ANY help will be appreciated with thanks and gratitude!
I found the following instructions which might be helpful:
Konsole (KDE)
KDE does not have an encoding for code page 437, or any similar encoding.
In menu Settings -> Encoding, if you select “Cyrillic (ibm866)” or “Western European (ibm850)”, then the encoding will the walls, floors, doors and corridors for IBMgraphics, but fountains and moats will look strange. A better option is to select “Unicode (utf8)”, then invoke luit as you would in an xterm.
Konsole can do IBMgraphics, with some help from luit.
To configure Konsole for IBMgraphics:
[ul]
[li] Use Settings -> Font -> Select… to pick a good font, such as “Fixed [Misc]” size “10” (or any size).[/li]> [LIST]
[li] Optionally, use Settings -> Size to resize your terminal for the new font. [/li]> [/ul]
[li] Select Settings -> Schema -> Linux Colors for a good gray-on-black look. [/li]> [li] Select Settings -> Encoding -> Unicode (utf8). Alternatively, start Konsole in a UTF-8 locale, so that the Default encoding is also UTF-8.[/li]> [ul]
[li] Optionally, now use Settings -> Save Sessions Profile… and call the profile something like “ibm”. [/li]> [/ul]
[li] At the command line, invoke luit -g2 ‘CP 437’ [/li]> [/LIST]
When you invoke luit, it starts a new shell (from where you may start NetHack). When you exit your CP 437 shell, luit exits and you return to your UTF-8 shell.
If you saved an “ibm” profile, then konsole -profile ibm will start a Konsole with the same settings. You still need to invoke luit -g2 ‘CP 437’ before you start NetHack with IBMgraphics. If you add a “Terminal Sessions” applet to your KDE panel, you can also access your profile with Terminal Sessions -> New Session Using Profile -> ibm.
Unfortunately, your Konsole will have serious graphical glitches at the Rogue level. This happens if you set Konsole to utf-8 and use luit, or if you set Konsole to ibm850 or ibm866 and do not use luit. Either way, the software will not map ASCII control characters to graphical characters. You may need to disable IBMgraphics while playing the Rogue level.
The current gnome-terminal does not have a setting for code page 437, but it does support other code pages that are equivalent for NetHack’s purposes, such as 862 (Hebrew).
To set code page 862 on gnome-terminal:
[ul]
[li] Select Terminal, Set Character Encoding, and then Add or Remove. [/li]> [li] In the pane on the left, select the line with description Hebrew and encoding IBM862. [/li]> [li] Click the right-pointing arrow between the two panes. [/li]> [li] Click Close. [/li]> [/ul]
The above steps only need to be done once for the lifetime of the Gnome installation. Once done, it is sufficient to:
[ul]
[li] Select Terminal, Set Character Encoding, and then Hebrew (IBM862). [/li]> [/ul]
It should be noted that the current default gnome-terminal font in Ubuntu Jaunty fully supports DECgraphics as long as eight_bit_tty is set to false.
