Linux console can’t display any language other than English while the terminal under Gnome can

Originally, "tty" had two definitions: the hardware (now the emulator) and the driver (interfaced through /dev/pty* or /dev/tty*).

The hardware/emulator was/is responsible for:

• Taking a stream of data and presenting it; this included interpreting control sequences like "move cursor left", "blinking cursor", "clear-screen" although these control sequences were often different among manufacturers.
• Sending keycodes for keys typed by the user; most of these were standard ASCII characters, but some terminals sent propriety keycodes for even standard keys.

The 'tty' driver was responsible for:

• Managing the buffering, in raw or canonical mode; for example, buffering a line of characters until Enter is pressed.
• Managing the control flow; e.g. being able to stop/continue with Cntl-s/Cntl-q.
• Translating propriety keycodes to standard ASCII, where applicable.
• Intercepting certain control characters (like Cntl-c and Backspace) and processing them appropriately (send SIGINT on a Cntl-c or signal an EOF on Cntl-d.
• Canonical display of characters, for example, if echo is turned off, then do not send feedback (character typed) back to the terminal.

The terminfo and termcap databases managed what terminal control characters should be sent for an operation (like 'clear-screen'). These control sequences were/are not interpreted by the driver, but by the hardware/emulator.

Basically, this may be a problem of mismatch between your locale, which is set to UTF-8, and the encoding of your Chineses character file, which may be encoded in gbk, gb2312, gb18030, or Big-5.

All those encoding listed above are incompatible with UTF-8.

Now, let's assume gbk is the encoding of your file. So when you try to show the contents of the file, a gbk encoded file is interpreted as a UTF-8 file, which causes the gibberish.

Here comes the solution.

• Use luit. (Preferred)

  $ whatis luit
  luit (1)             - Locale and ISO 2022 support for Unicode terminals
  

  luit -encoding gbk cat a_chinese_file.txt

Since most (if not every) encoding in use is compatible with ASCII, and if you only need characters in ASCII and another encoding, you can use the following two methods.

• Change the encoding of your terminal

  You may considered it since this method does not require additional package to be installed.

• Change Your locale

  But I think this requires you to install the corresponding locale.

Some details about the Chinese encoding mentioned above.

• gbk, gb2312, gb18030 are encodings for Simplified Chinese.

  If you are not sure which certain encoding your file is using, assume it gb18030.

  Number of characters contained in each encoding follows this: gb18030 > gbk > gb2312. And the superior encoding is a superset of what follows.

• Big-5 is the encoding for Traditional Chinese.

What's more, encoding for Simplified Chinese is sometimes refered as CP936 (Code Page 936, I think this name comes from Windows).