MB> I installed unicode fonts and changed the locale using 'export MB> LANG=ja_JP'. I executed 'date' which returned some garbage ascii MB> characters but not japanese. I feel somewhere there is a problem MB> of selecting the right character set. The fonts are there on the MB> system, but they aint being picked up for display.
You need to run a terminal emulator with the right font set. For the Unicode Japanese locale (LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF8), any UTF-8 terminal should be fine; recent versions of XFree86 come with a Unicode version of xterm, usually installed under the name uxterm (it's actually the same binary as xterm, but run with different options). The Gnome and KDE terminal emulators also support UTF-8. For the EUC-JP locale (LC_ALL=ja_JP), you need an... EUC-JP terminal emulator. Feel free to experiment with kterm or with the uxterm + luit combo: LC_ALL=ja_JP uxterm -e luit (In future versions of XFree86, xterm will do the Right Thing for the current locale and selected font, i.e. run in eight-bit mode, run in Unicode mode, or run in Unicode mode and invoke luit.) Juliusz