News, Technical ·Tuesday April 28, 2009 @ 23:36 EDT (link)
I rebooted cirith-ungol (the MythTV box) today because the power went out, and when I tried to switch virtual consoles (ctrl-alt-f[1-6]), it started spitting out random characters including a lot of question marks. It turns out (after much hair-pulling) that it's probably this Gentoo bug: console Unicode support is broken (damn furriners and their chicken scratchings they call writing!… if ASCII was good enough for Moses and Paul, …, etc. etc.). The following (substitute virtual console number for X) will fix it for you (and you may also need to set unicode to NO, or comment out the line, in /etc/rc.conf).
kbd_mode -a -C /dev/ttyX
echo 0 > /sys/module/vt/parameters/default_utf8
