Well.. here is my problem.. When I login on my shell, it displays me the motd and there is something odd, the server is from Canada, and the Admin write the motd using a few french characters and its displaying them like this:

Mod�le Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.60GHz 1024 RAM 100mbits filtr�e par Gigabits

can this be fixed somehow so that will display the French characters ?

Thanks in advance

What do you mean by "When I login on my shell"? Presumably you ssh to your remote host... but what terminal emulator do you use - or is it from the Linux text mode virtual terminals?

I use putty to connect .. but also the root user tells me that he has the same problem .. could it be something with locale ?

The problem looks like the program is outputting accented characters in one character set, but your terminal is set to use a different character set and so you get weird output. The locale settings can include a specific character set request, although applications may or may not support the requested settings.

In Putty's configuration, please check what character set is being used. This can be found under the Window / Translation area in the configuration window. What do you have for the "Character set translation on received data" drop down listbox?

Also, when you enter the command "locale" (after logging in) what output do you get?

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
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=

And what are your putty character set settings, as I described in my previous post?

One more question - the characters which print incorrectly... are they actually in the /etc/motd file? (you can see just by typing "cat /etc/motd")

yeah its from /etc/motd .. and I made a mistacke.. I`m using ssh on linux , but is the same when I use putty as well