Hi,

I've restored a friend's badly screwed up windoze box and part of that was copying his 'documents' folder over to a linux box before formatting. I am trying to copy them back via ftp, burning a cd via k3b and (because he's Brazilian) all the words with portuguese accents are unable to copy over and it's doing my head in.

Is there a way of telling Suse that everything in the folder /bob is portuguese and getting rid of those odd boxes that replace the correct letters.

Please help if you can, even if it's just a script to remove the graves, acutes, etc and leave them as plain 'english' e's

Keep it simple guy, tar it - and even gzip it if you like - before you copy it

That was my first idea, but I dread to think how long it would take to create a 20Gig .tar (even an uncompressed one...)

Why is linux so iffy with character encoding? I have never been able to input hebrew or arabic diacritics. I got a mac yesterday, loaded OOo and everything works, squiggly little dots n all...

no?...... I think I'll juat do it in OS X then... (find myself saying that a lot these days)

Language packs would be my first guess (says the English speaking american). Something to keep in mind is that OSX is built on a flavor of Linux, so, one would be led to think that if it can be done in OSX (and it's not CPU specific) it can probably be done in a *nix environment. Check that you have the OO.org language options installed on Linux.

Otherwise, yeah, I'd go with the 20GB tarball or something similar.

Cool

It's nothing to do with language packs. You need to specify the charset on the HD setup (yast in suse). It appears that it's a little buggy in opensuse as some files were 'readable', others not despite having the same permissions.

OS X is sooooo much more user friendly when it comes to internationalization. I have been using linux for 5 years and I have never worked out how to input hebrew or arabic diacritics. It worked first itme on my new mac...

Well, it's not really anything to do with Linux (the kernel). It's up to apps to interpret data files correctly. I would imagine that the files are being copied OK, you just need to correct localisation in the apps.

I don't understand that, what do character sets have to do with hard drives?