decided to make the plunge to debian from my suse.
apt-get is very good! updating the kernel to 2.6.8-2. was a piece of cake!

I have SCIM working in KDE3.3. but how do i display chinese filenames correctly?

the chinese filenames I saved from the internet are displayed as funny character inside my /home/user/ folder.

and chinesename.txt i created myself is displayed as ???

my .bashrc has
export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.gb2312"

my locale is

LANG=en_US
LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.gb2312
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_PAPER="en_US"
LC_NAME="en_US"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
LC_ALL=

any advice is appreciated.

First you need fonts with these characters installed. Normaly the package is called xfonts-xxx-big5. Then you should 'dpkg-reconfigure locales' and build the locales you'd want. In a mixed system like yours setting utf8 as default locale is a good idea.

U the man! U the man! UTF8 fixed the problem!

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.gb2312
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=