# enable unicode



## estellnb (Feb 16, 2009)

How can I enable unicode as the default character encoding of FreeBSD? 
Web resources seem to be of little help since certain packages seem to be missing to leverage unicode support; i.e. I do not have a unicode_start command like under Linux (http://www.nabble.com/Unicode-Console--td15603181.html).


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## nickolas (Feb 17, 2009)

FreeBSD doesn't support unicode in console now. 
But you can enable unicode in Xorg.


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## kamikaze (Feb 17, 2009)

You can change that in your /etc/login.conf (login.conf(5)). The usual way is to create groups named german, russian ... and set things up for these groups in the login.conf file.

Alternatively every user can override the system settings in the file ~/.login_conf.


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## estellnb (Feb 18, 2009)

The following entries in login.conf don't help:
	:charset=UTF-8:\
	:lang=de_DE.UTF-8:\

However 'LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 xterm' works well.
Nonetheless it works with xterm only.
Is there any way to leverage utf-8 with konsole?


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## kamikaze (Feb 18, 2009)

Have you run cap_mkdb?

Are you talking about a plain console? There's something in the ports, but it only works on i386.


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## estellnb (Feb 22, 2009)

What should cap_mkdb be good for?
What file should I run it upon?


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## estellnb (Feb 22, 2009)

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 xterm
works well while no other program seems to be capable of processing unicode characters by the time.
f.i. 'LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 konsole' does not work at all.


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## kamikaze (Feb 23, 2009)

Did you read the manual page?

You have to run cap_mkdb on the login.conf file after changing it:


			
				login.conf(5) said:
			
		

> The default /etc/login.conf shipped with FreeBSD is an out of the box
> configuration.  Whenever changes to this, or the user's ~/.login_conf,
> file are made, the modifications will not be picked up until cap_mkdb(1)
> is used to compile the file into a database.  This database file will
> ...


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## estellnb (Mar 5, 2009)

cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf
konsole & 
... and any newly launched konsole will use unicode characters


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## estellnb (Mar 5, 2009)

However, konqueror still displays unicode file names wrong and VLC still refuses to open files which names contain unicode characters;
- despite of a customized locale & cap_mkdb.


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## estellnb (Mar 14, 2010)

`cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf`

Besides this it is important the LC_ALL environment variable is already set on program invocation. Then it should also work with konsole & konqueror.


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## estellnb (Mar 18, 2010)

The following entries are the correct entries for /etc/login.conf:

```
:charset=de_DE.UTF-8: \
	:lang=de_DE.UTF-8: \
```
do not prepend LANG to de_DE.UTF-8 because otherwise LANG will go into the MM_CHARSET and LANG environment variables.


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