Newsgroups: redhat.config
Date: 2002-10-17 07:42:07 PST

> I'm experiencing a character / font problem loggin into a machine
> running Redhat 8 from a windows machine using ssh (Absolute Telnet). All
> special characters (such as line characters) appear as rubbish. Changing
> fonts on the client has no effect. Accessing a Redhat 7.x machine works
> perfectly.
> This is really frustrating becaus I'm sure the solution is simple.

Common problem with RH 8.0, and yes, it's (usually) a simple solution. The problem is caused by the change to UTF-8 locales with RH 8.0 — many older programs don't understand UTF-8, and this causes character mapping goofs. (There's a little section about this in the 'RELEASE-NOTES' file on installation CD #1 — scroll down to the 'Distribution General Notes' section.)

Try this first, just to make sure it *is* a UTF-8 problem — after you log into the RH 8.0 box via ssh/telnet, type "export LANG=C". Now see if the font problems have gone away.

If so, then you might want to edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n and change the default locale (the LANG setting) to a non-UTF-8 version. As an example, if you see:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

then change it to:

LANG="en_US"

or even just

LANG="C"

This has been working for most people.

Brett