Special characterss, e.g. with keymap fi-latin1, only produce beeps in emacs-nox while using it from X. Setting locales won't work. Reportedly, emacs-nox works from console.
I've confirmed this behavior. emacs-nox works "automagically" from console with latin1 keyboard characters (even with LANG=C) but doesn't work with these characters from X.
As this happens with RH6.2 too, I mentioned this to emacs-bugs. Consensus seems to be that this isn't easily fixable, and most don't consider it a bug at all. Also, there might be a problem with xterm's keyboard definition. This was, I think, the best response ( > == me): ----- >After inserting the following commands it seems to work: > >(set-terminal-coding-system 'iso-latin-1) >(set-language-environment "Latin-1") >(set-keyboard-coding-system 'iso-latin-1) > >Without terminal-coding-system, it'll just print question marks. > >However, getting this to work _like this_ wasn't really what I was >after; it did work with my site-start.el hack anyway. I want to get this >bug fixed so I don't need to distribute site-starl.el at all (and people >can use it themselves if they want). > >Please also note that setting LANG, LC_ALL etc. doesn't have any effect. If you set LANG to something that ends in "8859-1", such as fi_FI.ISO-8859-1, Emacs should display Latin-1 characters properly (try C-q d) also in an xterm. This is documented in the node "General Variables" in the Emacs Info documentation. Direct keyboard input of an d still doesn't work, unless you use set-keyboard-coding-system or the three-line set-input-mode call someone else posted. This is because the d key in an xterm sends Meta-D (pressing Alt-D causes xterm to send the exact same byte sequence to Emacs), and because Emacs can't distinguish between you pressing Alt-D and d, it thinks, by default, that you wanted M-d. After the set-keyboard-coding-system or set-input-mode, Alt-D produces an d instead of M-d (kill-word); you can't get both to work without modifying xterm's encoding settings. -----
See above - some of the emacs developers thinks of this as feature. Anyway, easy work around is to install emacs-X11.
Please note that that specific work around is not possible in certain situations. Most important of these is administering a server system (no possibility to install emacs-X11) from your X11-enabled workstation using SSH. You can set up keymaps etc. in .emacs or site-start file though.
*** Bug 21345 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***