Notes about migrating from ISO-8859-x to UTF-8¶

See also locales

From daduke¶

just some notes of the difficulties I encountered when migrating my account from ISO to UTF-8

• first off: locale. It's a mess and I cannot provide a thorough tutorial here, but make sure that LANG, LC_CTYPE and/or LC_ALL contain something with .UTF-8 at the end.
• next: terminal program. aterm can't do UTF-8, Eterm can't either, so use urxvt, uxterm or gnome-terminal
• terminal codepage: even w/ a UTF-8 capable terminal you sometimes still have to TELL the terminal to actually use UTF-8
• window manager: most WMs or desktop environments have their own language/i18n setting. Make sure those are set to UTF-8

From XTaran¶

• Use uxterm instead of xterm (both in the Debian/Ubuntu package xterm, uxterm is just a wrapper script)
• Use urxvt (Debian/Ubuntu packages rxvt-unicode*) instead of rxvt
• On Debian/Ubuntu (as root), use update-alternative --config x-terminal-emulator to set the default terminal emulator which most applications call to an UTF-8 capable terminal emulator (see comments above)
• At least on Debian/Ubuntu edit /etc/environment to set the global default locales.
• On Debian/Ubuntu (as root), use dpkg-reconfigure locales to configure which Locales should be generated.
• On Debian/Ubuntu install and use the package utf8-migration-tool.