UTF-8 on the console

Your VGA card needs to support VESA modes to make this work.

There is a lot of stuff on running UTF-8 on the console in combination with lilo, but very little on grub.
Below some info about my own setup (Debian Stable);

In boot/grub/menu.lst there is an entry 'kopt' (kernel options); 

## e.g. kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro
# kopt=root=/dev/hda3 ro vga=769
The lines with a single remark are remarks to grub, but not to update-grub. update-grub uses double remarks.

Enter the desired VGA mode on the line

Mode table in hex;

Colours640x480800x6001024x7681280x1024
2560x3010x3030x3050x307
32k0x3100x3130x3160x319
64k0x3110x3140x3170x31A
16M0x3120x3150x3180x31B

Decimal mode table;

Colours640x480800x6001024x7681280x1024
256769771773775
32k784787790793
64k785788791794
16M786789792795

Running 'update-grub' will edit menu.list; 

kernel		/vmlinuz-2.4.27-2-686 root=/dev/hda3 ro vga=769
There is no point in editing this line yourself, since an update-grub will remove it. You have to edit the line with the remark.

Edit /etc/console-tools/config to select the desired font; 

SCREEN_FONT=LatArCyrHeb-16
You also have to enable framebuffer.

You can select UTF-8 on boot time if you want. In /etc/init.d/console-screen.sh there is a section which checks for a UTF-8 locale and switches to UTF-8. I modified this script to work on all ttys; 

    CHARMAP=`LANG=$LANG LC_ALL=$LC_ALL LC_CTYPE=$LC_CTYPE locale charmap`
    if   test "$CHARMAP" = "UTF-8"
    then
        /usr/bin/unicode_start 2> /dev/null || true
        # The script only does tty1
        /usr/local/sbin/uni-boot.sh

    else
         /usr/bin/unicode_stop 2> /dev/null|| true
    fi
/usr/local/sbin/uni-boot.sh contains; 
#!/bin/bash

consolechars --font=LatArCyrHeb-16
for vc in `seq 2 6`
do
	consolechars --font=LatArCyrHeb-16 --tty="/dev/tty${vc}"
	/bin/echo -n -e '\033%G' > "/dev/tty${vc}"
done

exit 0
There really should be two separate scripts. One to set the charset on boot and one the set the charset on the fly.