Bug#67913: Handling of non-English characters screwed up
Package: base
Severity: important
The input and output of characters not in the traditional US-English
alphabet either does not work at all or not correctly. Not at all is
it consistent across packages.
Although this bug report is mostly about special German letters, I
believe that other languages may be broken as well.
The problem became apparent on a machine I cleanly installed from
the official potato test-cycle-2 cds. Even though I had selected
de-latin1-nodeadkeys for my keymap, the umlaut and s-sharp keys did
not work as expected:
1) At the login prompt they are displayed correctly for some reason.
2) At the bash prompt the umlaut keys would do nothing or "beep".
S-sharp acted somehow like cursor-up.
3) In emacs they work, but are displayed as another symbol.
4) If I save a file in emacs and display it, say, using less, all letters
show up correctly.
A helpful member of debian-user pointed out to me that I could create
~/.inputrc and put appropriate commands in there to make bash display
all characters. Why isn't this file created automatically by the
installation system?
Bash now does at the prompt, but if I 'touch file_with_an_umlaut', ls
displays only '?' instead of the umlaut in the file listing...
A recent upgrade to test-cycle-3 didn't change anything. Same for an
upgrade of the console-* packages to woody.
I never had such problems with earlier debian releases, also, when I
boot the install CD and open a shell from there everything works.
Please get back to me if you need more information or versions of
other packages. I don't know which are relevant. :(
Christian
$ uname -a
Linux jesus 2.2.15 #2 Tue Jul 25 00:59:33 CEST 2000 i686 unknown
$ dpkg -s console-tools console-tools-libs console-data bash | egrep
"Package:|Version:"
Package: console-tools
Version: 1:0.2.3-14
Package: console-tools-libs
Version: 1:0.2.3-14
Package: console-data
Version: 1999.08.29-12.1
Package: bash
Version: 2.03-6
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