From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.4 i686) Description of problem: gnome-terminal displays german umlauts as blanks. The gnome-terminal from RedHat 7.0 (included in gnome-core-1.2.1-33) displays german umlauts correctly. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start a gnome-terminal, and enter german umlauts. 2. 3. Additional info:
This behavior is related to (already reported) lack of internationalized menus in GNOME. It seems that without defining an LC_ALL environmental variable, GNOME refuses to use the locale set by LANG. This behavior is against the rules set in XPG4 and POSIX.2 which defines the LANG to be the choice if LC_ALL is not defined. Therefore, the scripts /etc/profile.d/lang.sh (and .csh) adhere correctly to the standard by undefining the LC_ALL variable if it is identical to LANG. There are many methods to circumvent the current situation: 1. Explicitly select "Deutsch" in the GDM menu (solves only the problem under X environemnt). In this case GDM set the LC_ALL variable. _OR_ 2. Add a line defining LC_ALL="de_DE" after the line with LANG="de_DE", then edit the files /etc/profile.d/lang.sh by commenting out lines as follow (and similarly with lang.csh): if [ -n "$LC_ALL" ]; then # if [ "$LC_ALL" != "$LANG" ]; then export LC_ALL # else # unset LC_ALL # fi else This is not a recommended way to solve the problem, because it is important to make GNOME compliant to XPG4 and POSIX.2. It is possible is that Ximian's GNOME 1.4 has already solve this problems.
Re: umlauts, if you go into gnome-terminal preferences and turn off the "use multibyte support" setting then it should work. Reopen the bug is not. Re: LANG/LC_ALL, I believe this is handled entirely by the C library and gettext(), GNOME isn't doing anything special. Anyway, you said it's being tracked in another reported bug so I won't leave this bug open for that.
I am not sure whether the C library is really the one to blame. Today, I have installed the Ximian GNOME 1.4 (which does not update the C library). Now, even without any LC_xxx set, the gnome-terminal is working properly. Unfortunately, I am now unable to reproduce the problem (the terminal of GNOME 1.4 also does not has a such option), may be backes.de should try this again.
Ximian "fixes" the problem with umlauts by not having Japanese multibyte support. Red Hat RPMs have a preference option; turn off "use multibyte" to get the Ximian behavior. Red Hat is in Japanese mode by default.
*** Bug 54084 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***