Hi,

I have a problem with the my files, which use greek letters. I can't see them.

Is there anything I can do?

Thanks in advance

Hello,

It'd be useful if you posted a little more information, such as which version of Slackware you're on (I'm assuming 12.2) and if it's in console or X you're having problems, and which desktop you're on (I'm assuming you're in X using KDE).

Despite the assumptions the first piece of advise is pretty general.

You need to set a UTF-8 locale in order to get unicode and thus show the special greek characters. Here's what I've done in my .bashrc/.profile:
The easiest way is just to set
This will give you UTF-8 settings and greek error messages in console applications.

However, since I'm not a big fan of translated system messages, I've gone with the solution listed on top, to control the format a bit more.

If you're having trouble in the KDE programs such as file manager etc, make sure you have set the right unicode there as well.

And if none of that works, report back with more details, and we'll see what we can do :-)

Hello Simeon, welcome to LQ.

What you could do is give us more information so we can help you.

What are your distribution and version ?
What is the encoding of you file (if you know it) ?
With which application do you try to read it ?

Hi,

thanks all for your reply and sorry for not being so clear.

I'm using slackware 12.2 without X. Only in CLI. Though I have the same problem With X (KDE).

All command-line applications such as vi,vim,emacs can't read greek characters. Actually I don't care about the content but only for the files and directories. For instance if a have a directory with files named with greek letters, and I type ls or ls -a, it seems that the directory is empty.

Actually I don't know the encoding. It's the default encoding that windows have for the greek language. I don't know if it plays a role but the format of the disk that I 'm trying to read the files is NTFS.

Yalla-One, could you give me the full path of the file I have to change, because I can't find it.

Slackware defaults to ISO, so by setting UTF-8 as I suggested you're most likely to have your problem solved.

You can either do it in $HOME/.profile (if you haven't already customized your home directory, chances are you'll have to create this file) or you can do it in
In that file you see a number of commented out "export LANG=" statements, with one saying "export LANG=en_us". Comment out that one, and replace it with either "export LANG=en_us.utf-8" or with the ones I suggested in the first post.

Easiest way though is to just append the lines I suggested to your $HOME/.profile by typing If you don't want greek messages, just type
instead...

Good luck!

Hi

You can find a nice howto about greek in linux, either in X and in CLI, here. It's written in greek though.

Regards

Really thanks for your reply. I'll try it and I'll inform you.

Bathory don't worry about the link you gave me. It think I can manage it since Greek is my native language. Give my respects to Piraeus.


Thanks again

The hellug howto is a bit old and most of the stuff mentioned there aren't needed.

In order to be able to type greek letters on the keyboard and read greek letters on the screen
the mininum you need is LC_CTYPE to be set. If you want a full greek enviroment so that even
commands return greek errors and messages you set LANG which will set everything.

As Yalla-One mentioned you can change the settings in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh (for sh like shells)
and /etc/profile.d/lang.csh (for csh like shells)

Use your favourite editor (eg vi, nano etc) to edit /etc/profile.d/lang.sh (assuming you are using
bash which is the most common).

Change the variable LANG to say "export LANG=el_GR.UTF-8". In the end of the file there is also
a line mentioning LC_COLLATE=C. This changes the sort order and has the effect that greek names
don't get sorted correctly. So disable this line by putting a hash # in the beginning of it

This tells the system to use a Greek locale. In order to actually see greek letters in console
you need to use a greek font and in order to type greek you need to use a greek keymap.
The scripts setting the font and the keymap are /etc/rc.d/rc.font and /etc/rc.d/rc.keymap respectively.
Choose the "gr.map" keymap and the "iso07u-16.psfu.gz" font.

In order to set the font instead of directly editing the script you can also run setconsolefont.

I include what my scripts look like in case it helps you.

/etc/rc.d/rc.font

/etc/rc.d/rc.keymap
/etc/profile.d/lang.sh
SPOILER tags didn't work so i removed all the comments (lines beginning with #) in order to
make the post smaller.

I hope i helped you.

Thanks imitheos for your help but unfortunately it didn't work.



Actually there wasn't such a file. The only file I found in r.d directory was rc.font.new. So I created a new rc.font



I also din't find rc.keymap. So I also created.

Is there any problem with the fonts that windows use? The files I was telling you have been created through windows and are in an NTFS or Fat32 format hard disk