Going to set up a web site and a few servers in colocation (no physical access), probably using Debian or Fedora.

The visitors will enter data in their own languages and in two ways:
1) their identity and address
2) any content they wish

Their identity is stored and used only for future authentication by a custom made routine.

Their content can be read by anybody who is able to understand the language of the author.

Can anybody suggest how these servers should be set up? Or point to suitable info?

(I have read all the posts on the subject, they are mainly about local use of foreign languages.)

All that is needed is that the server is able to accept the input and able to return the content to a visitor. There is no need for local display at the location of the server.

Of course, the visitor is expected to have his or her own machine already set up for the language.

For example, content received in chinese will be of interest to people who have a machine already set up with the chinese language and so on.

It seems that setting up UTF-8 may be all that is required but I'm not sure and I don't know of a good procedure to follow. I have tried Asian languages on my machine (Debian Sarge) and it didn't work.

Thank you for your help.

I believe that you should be able to see your asian characters on the system by setting the locale and connecting from a windows box (or whatever) with the locale set to the appropriate language.

You should be able to telnet to the linux box and see everything in the current language (e.g. directory listing information).

Your application will have to support UTF8, and storage of the customer information will be interesting, because I think that you will not just be able to dump multi-language data in a file on the OS. If you are using some DB then you can store multi-language data.

Thank you for your reply and the advices.