How to make the VT display chinese characters?

I booted the 10.10 32-bit Ubuntu livecd, and chose what I'm pretty sure is simplified chinese (second to last option on the language menu). After it booted into the trial environment, I hit ctl-alt-f1, typed ls, and was rewarded with diamonds instead of chinese. I conclude Ubuntu does not include chinese support for console/tty. Otoh, everything works wonderfully inside Gnome.

Fortunately, you can add chinese tty support. Install fbiterm and run it on a tty. It's a frame buffer that can deal with non-latin characters. I don't know yet how to make fbiterm used by default.

@FUZxxl, running fbiterm on a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10 in VirtualBox gives me your error Frame buffer device /dev/fb0: Open error. I found an UbuntuForum.org thread that suggests you need to load the kernel module that allows frame buffers. It's a bit old..here's what I did:

1. Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules. Add to the end of the file on separate lines: fbcon and vesafb.

2. Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer and uncomment vesafb.

3. Run: sudo update-initramfs -u -k all.

4. Make sure you have a vga line set in /etc/default/grub. Example: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vga=0x314"

5. Run update-grub.

Now you can reboot and run fbiterm at the virtual console.