====== What if you don't want UTF-8 as a default ? ====== <color purple>UTF-8</color> is great, I mean, this is wonderful. The problem is, it's not yet well supported, and most of the stuff I have is in <color purple>Latin1</color> (aka <color purple>ISO-8859-1</color>), and not <color purple>UTF-8</color>. That's why I would like all my apps to have <color purple>Latin1</color> as a default. I haven't found a straightforward way to tell that to Fedora and/or KDE and/or Linux. So I had to make a couple of modifications to some files... First, tell <color purple>GDM</color> (this is the program that displays the login page, before opening your window manager) you don't want <color purple>UTF-8</color>. In the <color green>/etc/gdm/locale.alias</color> file, I've replaced <file> French fr_FR.UTF-8,fr_FR </file> by: <file> French fr_FR.ISO-8859-1,fr_FR </file> Second, tell all the others apps you want <color purple>Latin1</color> as a default. This is controlled by the <color navy>LANG</color> environment variable. To know your current <color navy>LANG</color> value, type : <code console> $ echo $LANG </code> A more complete command to get the same result is <color red>locale</color> without any arguments. My LANG is "fr_FR.UTF-8". This is not what I want. So I modified the <color green>/etc/bashrc</color> file (system-wide autoexecuted bash file), and added at the bottom : <file> export LANG="fr_FR.ISO-8859-1" </file> That's it !\\ I had to logoff/logon to apply all the changes (due to gdm) **Edit years later:** Well, I finally switched to a full UTF-8 system :) ~~META:date created = 2006-09-17 02:29:00~~