Home » forums » Debian Help Forums: Users Helping Users » System Config and Admin

How to make Unicode (e.g UTF 8) to be the base of all charset related issues throughout the system on Debian

Tags:

That is:

How to make my [c,k]onsoles and terminals UTFcentric?
How to make pathnames and filenames UTFcentric?
How to make text docs UTFcentric?

Now, I am not asking of how to change a charset in certain app, but how to do it globally. Also, will this hamper the functionality of important commands like cp, tar, grep, etc. (I remeber that once cp simply ignored filenames with non-western alphabet)

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Magnoliacom
  • Newsvine
  • Furl
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
0
‹ cupsd is running amok NIS issues - ypbind not finding server ›

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

hmm...

Submitted by pinniped on Sun, 2006-10-15 17:05.

I haven't done that for a long time but I think you do:

dpkg-reconfigure base-config

That doesn't work on my desktop for some reason so I'm not sure I've got that right.

»

Locales

Submitted by georgos on Mon, 2006-10-16 04:01.

Hi there

AFAIK, this is controlled by the locale and particularly by the default system locale.

If you set your locale to some UTF-8 locale (like en_GB.UTF-8) all applications will assume UTF-8 to be your default charset. So, like in the example locale given before, even though everything is in English (more or less like the C locale) you still have UTF-8 as a charset.

What exactly do you mean by globally? Globally for your user or globally for all users of the system?

If you want to have it on a per user basis, just make sure that the UTF-8 locales exist with
dpkg-reconfigure locales
and assure that the user adds this to his .bash_profile (or whatever login shell configuration file his shell uses):
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8. Even though the system default locale is some none-UTF-8 locale, everything such a user will read and write and see is UTF-8.

To set the system default locale, also execute
dpkg-reconfigure locales and make sure that you select your favourite UTF-8 locale when it asks you about the system default locale. But again, this is not needed just to make UTF-8 "global" for one user, it will just affect what locale users will use that do not explicitly specify any locale themselves.

That's it!

Cheers, Georg

»

Thanks georgos, pinniped! I

Submitted by 1 on Tue, 2006-10-17 18:59.

Thanks georgos, pinniped! I always forget the dpkg-reconfigure commands. Is there a list of important ones somewhere?

»

official Debian documentation

Submitted by pinniped on Wed, 2006-10-18 02:47.

The Install documentation and other official docs on the Debian site actually tell you a lot. Way too much in fact - so most people forget it exists, but it's the place to look when you want to know things like "how do I set my timezone", "why is the stupid clock storing local time like WinDo$ does", and so on.

»

xfce4-terminal + ekg

Submitted by Xilon on Sat, 2006-11-25 09:24.

I didn't want to make a new thread for this little question so I thought I might as well post in this one...

I've been trying to get polish characters to work in EKG (client for the Gadu Gadu IM network), I run ekg in xfce4-terminal and am unable to get them working. I have setup the LANG variable and I am able to type polish characters inside xfce4-terminal, but they don't work in EKG.

I have also tried installing rxvt-unicode and running EKG in that, and the characters display perfectly, which means that it's not EKG's fault, and it can't be xfce4-terminal's fault either since I can type in polish :|

Any ideas why it doesn't work in EKG under xfce4-terminal?

»

What is the LANG content of ekg started from xfce4-terminal

Submitted by georgos on Mon, 2006-11-27 11:54.

Hi there

Just to be sure, read out the LANG variable from this:


cat /proc/`pidof ekg`/environ

What does it say?

Cheers, Georg

»

LANG content of ekg started from xfce4-terminal

Submitted by Xilon on Sat, 2006-12-23 11:21.

Quote:
LANG=en_AU.UTF-8

Seems to be ok, In EKG's configuration it has an aspell related configuration for the LANG. This is what is says:
Quote:
aspell_lang pl
aspell_encoding iso8859-2

I think that's alright, or should I change it to en_AU.UTF-8 (or pl_PL.UTF-8)? I don't think it has much significance since it's just spell checking...

Sorry for the late reply, I kind of gave up on this and only now resumed interest ;)

Edit: YAY!!! I'm not exactly what did it, but I change the default locale system wide to pl_PL (ISO-8559-2), NOT UTF, and it works :D Seems like the rest of the system uses English though, which is great because that's exactly what I wanted.

Edit2: Ok, some parts are in Polish :( crap, might have to play with that...

Edit3: Gah, seems the only way to get the Polish characters working is the have the locale set to pl_PL system wide. I tried running EKG using "LANG=pl_PL ekg" but it doesn't work.
Help? :(

»

Bug the author

Submitted by takeda on Thu, 2007-01-18 03:05.

EKG is not internationalized. It is hard coded to use ISO8859-2 and ignores LANG settings.

You should bug the author or contributors to fix it.

»

Change filenames & textfiles

Submitted by MagnusBerg on Sat, 2006-11-25 09:58.

Change filenames (train first, add '--notest' then you are ready.)
# convmv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 -r /home/magnus/Documents/ --notest

Change textfiles
# iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code=UTF-8 ./oldfile.htm > ./newfile.html

»
Syndicate content