Linux FAQ's & Manuals


setup your suse linux system to use utf-8

suse linux supports utf-8 locales quite well, but it is not yet the default in suse linux 8.2. after a fresh installation of suse linux 8.2 in your favorite language, you will still have the most commonly used legacy locale for that language as the default, for example ja_jp (same as ja_jp.eucjp) or de_de@euro.

if you are interested in using utf-8, please change the defaults in /etc/sysconfig/language or edit your personal profiles as described in section 3.2.

just remove anything behind the territory and replace it by .utf-8. for example:

    ja_jp        -> ja_jp.utf-8    ja_jp.eucjp  -> ja_jp.utf-8    ko_kr.euckr  -> ko_kr.utf-8    zh_cn.gb2312 -> zh_cn.utf-8    zh_tw.big5   -> zh_tw.utf-8    de_de@euro   -> de_de.utf-8 

etc. ...

please spell utf-8 exactly like this, using upper case letters and a hyphen. other spellings won't work with x11 (see also section 3.3).

for hints concerning the usability and setup of applications see the respective sections of this document, e.g. section 8 for terminal emulators, section 10 for text editors etc..

please have a look at the fonts section (section 5) as well!

when your are using a utf-8 locale, many programs will default to reading and writing text files in utf-8 encoding and usually file names are assumed to be utf-8 encoded.

if you have plain text files with contents in legacy encodings and files which have non-ascii names in legacy encodings, see section 18 for how to convert them to utf-8.

2005-03-09