I did some changes to the console driver for i386 (pccons.c). These are:

* Support of national keyboards.
  There are two ioctl's to get and set the keyboard translation tables.
  A little prog to set (at this moment) US/english or German layout is included.
  This prog should be run from /etc/rc.

  Why not including all tables into the kernel?
  -  No waste of space (20 tables use 60k of memory)
  -  Any user may set his preferred translation without hacking the kernel.

  Why ioctl's?
  -  It must be possible for the install program to ask for the keyboard
     and set it on a generic kernel.

* A screen blanker
  This may need further testing. I do not run X11 on my box.

* A partial ISO Latin1 to IBM Codepage 437 translation
  I tried to translate all characters > 127 that have a corresponding char in
  the Codepage 437.

People interested in these changes may get them from:

        ftp://bseis.eis.cs.tu-bs.de/pub/hannken/pccons.tar.gz

As this is a very vital driver I'm looking for review before I submit it.

Regards,
-- 
Juergen Hannken-Illjes - hannken@eis.cs.tu-bs.de - TU Braunschweig (W Germany)