Hi all,

I have had SuSE 8.2 installed on my system and replaced it by Fedora Core 1 now. I have left my data partition with ext2 filesystem (created using SuSE linux) untouched.

I can access the "old" data partition but all special characters in file names (german umlauts, characters with accents) appear strange:
- using the KDE file explorer the characters do not appear at all, it looks like they are not part of the name. When I try to open a directory with a special character the explorer tells me that the directory does not exist.
- mounting the file system on my Mac using OS X the characters show up as chinese signs (looks interesting, but this is not really usable )

Is there any setting to control this behaviour?

RedHat and Fedora normally use the UTF8 unicode character set while, as far as I remember, SuSE uses ISO8859-1. Open the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n and replace all occurences of "UTF8" with "ISO8859-1". (May depend on which language you normally use). That may solve your problem.

Thanks for ansering, torkn.

I changed i18n and it had an effect on the characters showing in KDE: the special characters show in different ways, but unfortunately not the right way :-( I tried UTF8, ISO8859-1 and CP850 (see below). None of them shows my umlauts correctly.

But I have found a solution for the Samba part of the problem: strange enough I have to use code page 850 as character set ("unix charset = cp850") to display the correct characters on other machines (mac and windows) mounting the share.

Anybody any more ideas for KDE ?

Sorry that it didn't solve your problem.
Did you try any of the other 8859-codes? I use a computer with RedHat 7.1 as a Samba fileserver for Windows and Linux (Fedora) machines. It has been running continuously for I have forgotten how long. The fileserver uses "ISO8859-1" character set in "i18n" and "client codepage=850" in "smb.conf". This works well both for Windows and Fedora clients. I also have a FAT32 harddisk partition on my computer which is used both by Fedora and Windows 2000, with no problem.

Hallo again torkn,

never mind you could not solve the problem completely but you have helped me thinking into the right direction.

I have found a solution now with a different approach. Maybe it can help somebody else so I write it down here.

I recoded the file names of my disk from CP850 to UTF-8 the following way.

- set "unix charset = cp850" in smb.conf and restart smbd
- mount the drive and copy all files to another computer
- unmount samba
- set "unix charset = UFT-8" in smb.conf and restart smbd
- mount again and copy files back

This way all my file names are in UTF-8 now and they show up correctly in samba and in KDE.

This might not be the easiest way but it worked for me.

Hi there!

thanks for your comments, helped to solve the problem!

http://www.petah.at/forum/viewtopic.php?t=82

Problem was, not to be able to read previous copied (from ntfs to ext3) files within linux environment. Special characters were not displayed and files not acessible, what a joy!
Because of use of the english language for OS the mistake was found in /etc/sysconfig/i18n.
old one:
new one:

I just found this thread and thought i post a reply just for those that find this by googling.

To convert filenames and filesystems from one charset to another you can use the 'convmv' command. SuSE 9.1 has this in the base install, but if your distro does not have it (as for Fedora Core 3 RC2 for example) check there:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/convmv

Laas