special characters not displayed after remote mount (SAMBA) (NCP)

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

Situation

When mounting a remote filesystem on a SLE10 system through Samba or ncpfs, special characters in filenames are not displayed correctly. For example accented characters as used in French, or umlauts as used in German. The LANG environment variable is set already, e.g. through

export LANG=de_DE@euro

but the special characters are still not displayed correctly.

Resolution

The LANG environment variable controls the language used for messages in localised software. It does not control what characters are considered printable. This is controlled by a different environment variable, LC_CTYPE, which has to be set explicitly. To stick with the example for the missing German umlauts the solution would be to issue

export LANG=de_DE@euro
export LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro

and in any other language accordingly. To use this setting permanently, set the RC_LANG and RC_LC_CTYPE variables in /etc/sysconfig/language and run SuSEconfig to activate these changes.

Disclaimer

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