Leon Ho writes: > Hi Mikko, > > How does this compare to gnome-terminal? > > And have you tried to change the Settings -> Encodings to 'UTF-8' in konsole > and see if it works? Hi Leon, Thanks for your input but I found the problem. The solution came from Enrique Perez-Terron in comp.os.linux.setup newsgroup. He helped me to compare several config files which helped me to avoid wasting my efforts to something that is correct. Also I got several good hints from him: - The 'ls | od' is not a good test to check the output of ls-command as ls behaves differently when the output is terminal (now I used to know this!). A better way is to use: script ls exit od -c typescript - Another great idea was to check the environment of a running program from /proc/PID/environ. - Third we compared the environment and output of the xev-command and indeed for him the XLookupString returned 2 bytes and a valid utf-8 code when for me it returned one garbage byte! - The finally decisive idea was to use strace -e trace=file locale. This revealed: open("/usr/lib/locale/posix/LC_COLLATE", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) and the whole directory /usr/lib/locale/posix actually is missing. So the problem was all the time the LC_COLLATE=posix! I have had this as long as there has been iso-8859-1 locale. As a programmer I like to see Makefile and README first in the directory listing and all over the net everyone tells to use locale 'posix'. Well this does not exist in FC4. There is locale 'C' which seems to produce similar result in LC_COLLATE. So, problem solved!!! Now national character input works OK and ls lists filenames OK! Hope this info helps someone else. It seems to me the LC_COLLATE setting should not affect the results of other locale variables, but maybe the locale processing dies in the middle when it encounters an unknown setting. So I can see where this could come from. There may be some need to improve the robustness of locale processing in glibc. -- Mikko Harjula puh. 010-525 1555 mikko.harjula@xxxxxxxxxxx gsm 040-778 6669