Filename problems
 

I am a newbie.
I have just recently started using Lucid Lynx. I have files created in Windows 98 and later which I still need to access. Some of of the files have extended Latin characters in them, like tilde and cedillas. Examples of the filenames are:

Doña_Clara.doc
Façade.doc

When listed in Thunar, the filename becomes

Do�a_Clara.doc
Fa�ade.doc

This presents a problem because I sometimes need to access the same files from a Windows machine.

If I rename the files in Thunar (or any Linux file browser), the filename becomes unreadable in Windows.

If say I rename a file in Thunar to read as Doña in Linux
when accessed in Windows explorer it becomes - Doña

I know that my final option is to remove all European characters in my filenames.
I want to know if there is a solution to this.
And also why it happens.

I would appreciate any help this.

Thank you.

Hi Prepian and welcome to this forum.

Unfortunately I don't know the answer to your problem, but have you tried adding locales to your installation? I'm not familiar with Lucid Lynx (is that an Ubuntu version?) so can't tell you how.

Try starting a new thread asking about installing different locales.

Tom

If the files live in a fat or ntfs volume, the key is mounting it using the correct encoding settings. What kind of fs is it, then?

Thank you for replying

@ tommyttt - Lucid Lynx is the 2010 release of Ubuntu

@ i92guboj - I'm accessing files in ntfs and fat32. Part of my hard disk is in ntfs & fat32 and my back-up external disk is in fat32. How do I set the encoding settings when mounting? The external drive mounts when I plug it in - and I just begin to use it. I think your reply is getting me nearer to the solution

The built in disk is mounted using the directives in /etc/fstab. For the basic information how this is handled read the latter with particular reference to the mount options for fat / ntfs file systems.

The external disk is another thing again. I suppose it is an USB drive. Those are handled by udev. Again a lot to read:

http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Customizing_UDEV
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/udev8.html
http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/util...tplug/udev-FAQ

HTH

The man page for mount is the first thing you should be reading. Specially the mount options for vfat (and more specifically "iocharset" and "codepage") and those for ntfs ("nls" and "utf8"). However, for ntfs you should be using ntfs3g instead of the in-kernel ntfs driver, which will probably fix all your problems.

Once you can mount the fs by hand (using the mount command) and everything is ok, it is time to start looking at how your distro automounts the volumes, and see how we can change the default mount options.

again thank you for the replies. I will start reading up on the links sent by JZL240I-U

I guess I'll have to get my hands wet. I've just mainly used Lucid Lynx out of the box and been hapy about it.

Good for you ;). Learning is fun. Good luck.