There are number of programs able to convert from KOI-8 to
Alt and back. You can even use the special mode for emacs
(see section
Emacs).
One nice standalone package is translit. It is available at the
SunSite archive. This package is capable of converting between
different formats including the KOI-8 and the Alt ones.
So far, I explained the ways to make the programs accept and display the Cyrillic codeset. However the full localization of the system comprises much more. All discussed above is not enough. The system should be friendly for a user who doesn't necessarily speak English. In my own opinion, it is not a big deal to become familiar with English at the level of the programs' messages. However, it is not quite fair to require it.
Thus, the next level of localization requires the programs to be customizable to the requirements of different languages and data representation habits.
Before, that was done by developing some abstraction of the messages to output from the program's code. Now, such mechanism is (more or less) standardized. And, of course, there are free implementations of it!
The good news is that GNU finally adopted the way of making the
internationalized applications. Ulrich Drepper
(drepper@ipd.info.uni-karlsruhe.de) developed a package
gettext. This package is available at all GNU sites like
prep.ai.mit.edu. It
allows you to develop programs in the way that you can easily make
them support more languages. I don't intend to describe the
programming techniques, especially because the gettext package
is delivered with excellent manual.
So, if you are developing programs which output messages (have you ever developed any program which didn't?), then don't be lazy to put a little (yes, really little) effort to make your program locale-aware.
Request for collaboration: If you want to learn the gettext
package and to contribute to the GNU project simultaneously; or even
if you just want to contribute, then you can do it! GNU goes
international, so all the utilities are being made locale-aware. The
problem is to translate the messages from English to Russian (and
other languages if you'd like). Basically, what one has to do is to
get the special .po file consisting of the English messages for a
certain utility and to append each message with it's equivalent in
Russian. Ultimately, this will make the system speak Russian if the
user wants it! For more details and further directions contact Ulrich
Drepper (
drepper@ipd.info.uni-karlsruhe.de).