Description of Problem:
Since redhat now defaults to UTF-8 locale settings, that implies that
communications through the console should be utf-8 encoded. On the contrary to
this, when i start the python interpreter in an UTF-8 locale data that is input
is treated as if the input was in the iso-8859-1 encoding.

Consider for example the following session:

[noa@ulysses c]$ echo $LANG
sv_SE.UTF-8
[noa@ulysses c]$ python
Python 2.2.1 (#1, Jul 25 2002, 18:55:29) 
[GCC 3.2 20020720 (Red Hat Linux Rawhide 3.2-0.1)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = u"e"    #this aring is entered with my swedish keyboard
>>> len(s)
2


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
python-2.2.1-14