hello everyone,
i was trying to copy some files from a friend of mine that are named in greek...
i have an ntfs external hd to which i copied the files from his pc. then i came back and connected the external hd to a slack11 box as usual..

when i navigated into the folder the folders where not there...
ls -la didn't show anything either... and
du -sh wouldn't account for the size of these apparently non existing folders...

so i disconnected the drive and connected it to a winXP box and voila the folders where there....

what is my linux box missing to be able to understand greek ?

TIA,
nass

Did you try mounting the drive manually with character set specified? Your drive probably uses utf8 encoding, so you can try that as a starter. We recently had a discussion about displaying Turkish characters under utf8, you may find some hints over there (we also discuss how to change the console encoding, which you don't need).

Try adding a line to your fstab asking for a specific charset

for example

/dev/sdb2 /media/usb2 vfat,ntfs-3g user,rw,suid,dev,noexec,async,quiet,gid=100,iocharset=iso8859-7,umask=007 0 0

If you use the old ntfs (or the vfat) driver you should use the iocharset=iso8859-7 option for Greek or the option utf8, depending on the way you have configured your system (iso or utf greek). Man mount for details.

Normaly when you use the new ntfs-3g driver you don't need to pass any options, if you have proper greek support on your system. In case you still have problems try following the instructions found here

http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale

since there is locale option you can set. Man ntfs-3g for details.

Gefst

i somehow (without changing any settings in fstab) managed to mount the drive and this time i could see these folders from console...when i say 'see' i dont mean i could see the proper folder name but some weird glyphs instead... in order to see the proper names i must always do a 'unicode_start' ... then i can see everything properly...

my current LC_ALL system variable, I have set to en_US.utf8 ... so as not to screw up anything (some incompatible programs to el_GR.utf8)...
either way setting LC_ALL to el_GR.utf8 doesn't help as i always have to type in 'unicode_start' from a console window....

also adding unicode_start to my ~/.bashrc screws up my sftp connections, since i usually get this error msg after running unicode_start
that the sftp client can not handle, and i can not redirect its output to /dev/null.. so that it won't screw up the sftp (even though i won;t be seeing the error msg anymore in the console window)

i think i need a serious and thorough look into the whole language thing in linux... locales, languages,utf, unicode etcetc... is there some good reading for it?

You can find all the information you need here (in Greek):

http://members.hellug.gr/djart/grlinux.html

Patrick suggests to avoid utf8 if you can do without it for the moment.

Gefst