On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 10:14:22PM +0200, Stefan Persson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote a message of 23 lines which said:
> >Just wondering if anybody knowss how unicode is on Linux? > > > Very good support. Very optimistic. Kernel ***** 1) File names in Unicode: no (well, the Linux kernel is 8-bits clean so you can always encode in UTF-8, but the kernel does not do any normalization and the applications do not expect UTF-8, for instance ls sorts alphabetically but dot not know Unicode sorting). 2) User names: worse since utilities to create an account refuses UTF-8. Applications ************ 3) grep: no Unicode regexp 4) xterm (or similar virtual terminals): No BiDi support at all 5) shells: I'm not aware of any line-editing shell (zsh, tcsh) that have Unicode character semantics (back-character should move one character, not one byte) 6) databases: I'm not aware of a free DBMS which has support for Unicode sorting (SQL's ORDER BY) or regexps (SQL's LIKE). 7) Serious word processing: LaTeX has only very minimum Unicode Also, many applications (exmh, emacs) are ten times slower when running in UTF-8 mode. At the present time, using Unicode on Unix is an act of faith. > Default charset for recent versions of some popular distributions. Yes, RedHat changed the default charset to Unicode without thinking that text files were no longer readable. See: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/Unicode-HOWTO.html http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/debian-utf8/howto.html