Hello all!

I'm new to KDE and I'm trying to figure out how to customize my systems locale. I'm using KDE 4.8.90 and dolphin won't list any Greek filenames correctly. Where do I change from ANSI to unicode/UTF8 system wide? Even konsole won't change to utf 8. I went into konsole profiles > advanced > default character encoding. I changed that to UTF-8 but konsole still is unable to properly list Greek names.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

thank you

any suggestions anyone please?

Which distro do you use?

Hans wrote:Which distro do you use?

kubuntu 12.04
kde 4.8.90

default font is deja vu san which I know supports greek fonts. Also tried Arial and Times New Roman

Update: I have some new very strange behaviour to report!!

When I'm browsing network SMB:// folders, dolphin properly shows non-english files and Greek names!!
However when I try to copy one of those files to, let's say my home dir (ext4), the file is copied with distorted characters like ?''??@@!??.mp3

Please paste the output of the command "locale". It sounds like you may be missing the locale files.

bcooksley wrote:Please paste the output of the command "locale". It sounds like you may be missing the locale files.

Actually I just fixed it now but the only way I could find was by switching to using lightdm instead of kdm.

I noticed the strange behaviour with kdm after I switched to a root terminal outside of X (alt+F1) and saw that that terminal had correct locale (el_GR.utf8), while in KDE the locale was set to POSIX. For some reason kdm doesn't obey what's in /etc/environment nor /etc/default/locale.

I happened to have installed lightdm too and switched to that and bam, my locale was also set to el_GR.utf8 from /etc/default/locale.

If you happen to know how to fix kdm's behaviour I would be happy to hear it.


thank you for the help!

From what I understand, KDM should not have been able to affect this - it was possibly a temporary issue (as simple as needing to restart KDM to get the new environment variables applied).

bcooksley wrote:From what I understand, KDM should not have been able to affect this - it was possibly a temporary issue (as simple as needing to restart KDM to get the new environment variables applied).

believe me I've restarted plenty of times
In fact I confirmed it's a bug http://bit.ly/TsKcUC

It took me a couple of days to figure it out . If I hadn't dropped out of X, I'm sure I would have never found out what was wrong.

latebeat wrote:

bcooksley wrote:From what I understand, KDM should not have been able to affect this - it was possibly a temporary issue (as simple as needing to restart KDM to get the new environment variables applied).

believe me I've restarted plenty of times
In fact I confirmed it's a bug http://bit.ly/TsKcUC

It took me a couple of days to figure it out . If I hadn't dropped out of X, I'm sure I would have never found out what was wrong.

PS: on the plus side, lightdm seems to work much better (more customizable, looks great and fingerprint login works better)