Encoding problem on Debian
 

I've got 3 pc's running, respectively, Wheezy/Sid, Mint 13 Maya and Ubuntu 10.04.

On Facebook some of the names of my photo albums contain characters with umlauts (ö, ä, etc). These characters display correctly on the Maya and Ubuntu installations but not on the Debian installation.

I've googled. I've reconfigured locales. I've rebooted (used to be a Windows user in the previous century ...). All to no avail. Can someone suggest a further avenue to explore?

Much appreciated.

Joe

You may need to install the appropriate language support for the Desktop Environment you are using (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc.).

Thanks for the quick answer - much appreciated. My next question is how do I determine what the appropriate packages are? As mentioned in my original post, I have reconfigured the locales and I made sure that the Debian locales are the same as the Maya locales.

Debian doesn't spoon feed it's users a fully configured system the way that Ubuntu and other distros do... It leaves more of that up to you. Use Synaptic (sudo apt-get install synaptic ... if not installed), and search for the language support packages for your language...

I am aware that Debian does not spoon-feed its users. Unfortunately this knowledge does not help me solve my problem, hence my presence here.

I have compared the installed files in Debian and the Maya installations by searching for "language support", "german" and "deutsch" in synaptic. In all three cases the results are either identical or the description of the files installed in Maya do not indicate that it solves the problem I am experiencing.

If anyone can point me to the appropriate packages that should be installed on Debian, I'd be grateful.

Try this link:
http://www.imixs.org/roller/ralphsja...oding_de_de_on

Thanks for the link. I followed the instructions and changed /etc/locale.gen by uncommenting the relevant entries (de_DE.* and de_CH.*). Unfortunately that made no difference, not even after a reboot.

Any further hints & tips will be very welcome.

If you are using Iceweasel/Firefox you probably need the appropriate language pack(s) installed.

for example:
iceweasel-l10n-de - German language package for Iceweasel

You also need to be using a font that has support for the particular language.

For Firefox you can download the language pack from:
Dictionaries & Language Packs :: Add-ons for Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...anguage-tools/

Iceweasel - Debian Wiki - http://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel

Thanks. Tried it, but no luck :(

It really seems to be a Debian problem. Perhaps it's because I have a Wheezy/Sid distro ...

OK,... Change gears... Try installing Chrome from Google direct... If you have issues with Chrome being closed source, then I would recommend Chromium (the OS [Open Source] version of Chrome).

Chrome;
https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/

Chromium;
http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

Then we can see about importing your Firefox links, after the fact...

Hey, that's a good suggestion, thanks.

Instead of reinstalling chrome afresh, I decided to try it with Opera. The results are the same. I have now tested with Firefox, Iceweasel, Chrome, Epiphany and Opera and it's all the same - it doesn't work on my Wheezy/Sid box, but it wotks on Ubuntu 10.04 and Mint Maya. Surely that means the problem is with the OS flavour? Could it be a config file that is wonky? Where can I start searching?

A further bit of information is that this does not occur consistently across all websites, i.e. there are websites that display the correct characters. I know for a fact that one of those websites where it displays correctly encodes the characters in the format "&nnn;" or "ä", whereas on a site like FB the characters are entered directly from the keyboard as "ö", etc. Hope this helps to clarify a tad ...