I was wondering how the displaying and typing of foreign characters works under Linux (primarily the accented vowels used in Spanish and the 'a' and 'o' with two dots over them used in Finnish). I'd like to eventually set it up so I can type any of these in any program, and most programs display them correctly. Here's a few things I've noticed about it so far:

1. In an XMMS playlist, any unknown characters are simply left out of the title.
2. In a terminal, the characters are shown as slash-codes (e.g. V\204rttin\204).
3. In Mozilla Firefox, Asian characters do not appear correctly.

What do I need to do to read/type these characters?

Thanks,
Johnathan

Well, I don't know how to solve 1 and 2, but you might want to try changing the encoding via View > Character Coding > [Encoding Type]. This works in Mozilla, anyway...

I don't believe that option is in Firebird. Also, what would I change the encoding to? In IE under Windows all the Asian characters display fine under the default encodings and settings (which, as far as I was able to tell, are the same as on Firebird), but Firebird won't show those.

As far as typing the characters and viewing them on the system, I've done some research and found some things about keyboard layouts, a binding file that is part of X, and some different options, but none of them seem to address exactly what I'm looking for and some of them I just don't understand. I'm sure people have done this before, and viewing and typing foreign language characters can't be that unusual. I just want to know what the easiest way is to do this. For example, on Windows, you set up the other keyboard layouts (US Intl.) and you hit right-alt and a key and you get that with an accent. In X, it looks like you are stuck with one layout without an easy way to swap between them. And I still haven't found anything about the XMMS and terminal displays.