(comp) fbiterm and Japanese (and French...)

[Jean-Christophe Helary <fusion@mx6.tiki.ne.jp>]

I am in the process of installing Debian on a 5 years old PowerBook  
(Titanium 667mgz) and since configuring X is still a pain in the butt  
I decided to stay in console mode.

I  checked the web a little bit and found that if I wanted to be able  
to do multilingual work smoothly I needed either jfbterm or fbiterm.  
I opted for the later after seeing that development on the former was  
stalled and proceeded with install.

Although I am not sure whether that mattered or not, I created 3  
UTF-8 based locales: en_GB / ja_JP and fr_FR@euro and selected the  
later as my default locale.

I tried MC in fbiterm in the fr_FR.UTF-8 locale and it worked like a  
charm. There  are a few glitches but much less than when displaying  
under unicode_start.

Now I need to figure out a number of things that are not exactly clear:

1) My keyboard is roughly a jp106. How can configure the system to be  
able to input French with as little hassle as possible ?

2) Second input question: I need Japanese input. What is the input  
method that works the best with fbiterm ? And will all applications  
running in fbiterm accept the input. Are there still applications  
that do not support UTF-8 input/display ?

3) Are the fonts installed with fbiterm enough to display Japanese  
and French at least ?

Thanks in advance.

Jean-Christophe Helary