I'm using KDE 3.4 and I want to run irssi using ISO-8859-1 or -15. Since the input seems to be in UTF-8 by default, I have tried to change the encoding from Konsole's configuration. It doesn't work, though. When I try to type characters like ä and ö in irssi, all I get is garbage on the command line. It doesn't matter if I change the term_type in irssi between 8bit and utf-8. The Gnome console makes no difference, and a real text mode doesn't even work with the right keyboard layout to begin with. Typing those characters in the terminal doesn't work perfectly, either. The first ä or ö I type doesn't appear, but when I erase them with backspace, the first one comes up, too. Something's not working right.

I have tried changing all the encoding settings I can find, and using different combinations of them. Still doesn't work. What now? Maybe changing the default system-wide encoding? Or possibly just for irssi? I hope someone can help me, setting a goddamn character set can't be this hard!

I just had the same problem with Ubuntu which uses utf8 as default charset. I solved the problem by installing configure-debian ("apt-get install configure-debian"), and using that to change the default locale :
base -> locale -> fi_FI ISO-8859-1; ok
"Which locale should be the default in the system environment?" -> fi_FI