Ah. An encoding problem it looks like. Which terminal are you using? And what is your locale set to?

I'm using some utf8 characters in the menus now. I guess a test to see if unicode is enabled would be the right way to do this.

@sunta

You use a non-English language?

I don't think it's a language problem. It's how utf8 characters look in a non-utf8 terminal.

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I'm using rxvt, LANG=en_US?

@Darth Vader, nope I'm from the UK.

QED. No UTF8 terminal, like @dive suspected.

@dive

For the SOMA from -current, in a terminal logged as ordinary user, show me no stations. Just the main screen, and the other sub-pages looks working, only the first menu item (change station) nope.

I.e. I changed theme to slack.

rxvt doesn't support utf8 and you aren't using a utf8 locale anyway. I will put in some checks to avoid this, but if you want to use utf8 then you need to:

Either:

Put 'export LANG=en_US.UTF-8' somewhere in your shell startup script (.bashrc, .bash_profile, .zshrc etc), or:
Edit /etc/profile.d/lang.sh and change it there for a system-wide setting.

Then you need to use a UTF-8 enabled terminal. There are a few that come with slack, like uxterm (basically utf8 enabled xterm), xfce4-terminal, konsole. Out of these I'd probably go with uxterm or xfce4-terminal. Konsole will probably want to bring with it a bunch of kde libs (unless you are already using kde and don't care?)

There are some out-of-stock terminals you could use, like Terminator (uses the vte plugin lib the same as xfce4-terminal), rxvt-unicode/urxvt (a closer match to rxvt and lighter than terminator/xfce4-term). Both terminator and urxvt are on slackbuilds.org (search for rxvt to find urxvt on slackbuilds.org).

If you want to enable utf8 in the plain linux (non-x) console then you can add vt.default_utf8=1 to the append list in /etc/lilo.conf.

Example from mine:

append=" vt.default_utf8=1 raid=noautodetect ipv6.disable=1"

near the top of lilo.conf. Then run lilo.

I hope that this info has been useful. Let me know if you have any problems doing any of the above.

This came in while I was typing to the previous Q.

But you are using the soma in -current now, or the updated one that I posted in this thread. The version in -current doesn't work properly because of changes in dialog that means my old method of using slashes in the station list no longer works. Since I found out that I've been developing soma in -current and then testing on 14.2.

The version in this thread ought to work. Please let me know.

dive, what terminal are you testing soma on?

sunta, in -current I'm using the plain linux console, ie without X. But it is utf8 enabled. In 14.2 I'm using terminator.

But, since your first post here I tested in rxvt and uxterm.

No problem.

I talk about the one shipped by -current, not this 3.x series.

But how you are aware about issue, and hopefully is fixed into 3.x, I will upgrade it right now.

It was posted on this forum when I announced it. I made a current VM and did some debugging. I wasn't even aware that dialog was still being developed, but it is, and has changed since 14.2.

The 3.0.2 works fine in the now -current. Tested with BBC Radio 1

BUT no love for ambient music? You know, the thing for ambiance and relaxing, while you do something else, i.e. working.

I had a 4 hour recording of rain and thunder filched from youtube. Bliss! I recommend it.

Well if you find any let me know. There may be something on that tunein website, but I haven't had time to explore it all yet.

Long story short, the SOMA is impressive! Congratulations!

But I am a bit disappointed that it refuse to work as root, that I consider a sign of Fortress Syndrome.

Come on! What thing you consider I do more dangerous in that computer? Building the Apache Tomcat and all the JAVAish suite or listening in the same time to BBC Radio in a pair of desktop cases about 1W each one?