Disclaimer: All information collected here is verified only for the most recent supported operating systems (currently Scientific Linux 5 and Windows XP) and for the most recent versions of centrally installed software (usually RPM's under Linux and Netinstall packages under XP).

Why UTF8

It is best explained in numerous articles in the internet such as the [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html UTF8 and Unicode FAQ]

Using UTF8

See the chapter 4.3 on Language support,UTF8 in ["SL5_User_Information"] for information on the current setup and how to change it. Basically to get full utf8 support you should create a file ~/.i18n containing the line LANG=en_US.UTF-8. Then after logging out and in again (or in a new window) you will have UTF-8 support.

UTF8 support in programs

To test the UTF8 awareness of different programs you can download an excellent [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt UTF8 demo file]

Terminal programs

• test the programs by issuing the command

  cat UTF-8-demo.txt 

  in the terminal

• xterm

  • you have to use an UTF-8 Locale such as en_US.UTF-8 (see above)
  • you have to select an ISO10646-1 font for the xterm

  • both can be achieved with the command

    LANG=en_US.UTF-8 xterm -fn '-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1' & 

• konsole and gnome-terminal

  • if you use an UTF-8 Locale such as en_US.UTF-8 (see above) it works out of the box, otherwise you have to change the encoding to UTF-8 in the settings and terminal menu respectively

Mail readers

• test the mail readers by sending the UTF-8-demo.txt file as an attachment to yourself

• pine

  • very incomplete UTF-8 support, not suitable for proper display of mails with varying encodings, not recommended

• alpine

  • you have to use an UTF8-capable terminal and to use an UTF-8 Locale (see above)

  • as you can verify with the test file, UTF-8 support is fairly good but still far from being complete

• thunderbird

  • versions 1.5.0.12 and above should work out of the box
  • the netinstall package under Windows XP does currently set two options preventing a display with varying character encodings. You must uncheck the "Apply the default character encoding to all incoming messages" in both the settings and the folder specific dialogs:

    attachment:Bildschirmfoto-ThunderbirdPreferences.png attachment:Bildschirmfoto-FolderProperties.png

Other software

• less

  • to display UTF-8 text the ENV variable LESSCHARSET must be set to utf-8 and you have to use an UTF-8 capable terminal (see above)
  • a test with less UTF-8-demo.txt shows the same results as tests

Unsolved problems