# urxvt cannot deduce encoding from font (koi8u-monaco)



## DaLynX (Feb 11, 2015)

Hello there,

I've been setting up my first FreeBSD desktop VM for the last few weeks, setting up XOrg, awesome and slim, but now I'm encountering an issue trying to connect to the Unicode / UTF-8 world.

I ssh'd on my linux server where an IRC client runs with a lot of UTF-8 chars, and realized I didn't set that up yet. So I chose to switch from xterm to urxvt. That part went well. But now I'm trying to install an appropriate font, to display all the extended chars.

I installed the koi8-u-monaco package, and can find the fonts in my /usr/local/lib/X11/fonts. I added up the FontPath in my xorg.conf, and can see it's taken into account in the Xorg.0.log file - but not in the Xorg.1.log?

When I run `fc-list`, no monaco font in there.
When I run `xterm` with a -fn option and the appropriate font name (with all the dashes '-'), it loads the font, but if I run `urxvt` with it, it says it cannot deduce the encoding from the file name and decides to ignore the font, and as it's the only font I give in arguments, exits.

Could you give me some directions as to what can have gone wrong in my process ?
I tried looking for solutions for that error message but Google isn't very verbose about this one.

Edit: I know FreeBSD isn't really optimal for Desktop use, but I'm starting to use it for my servers too and would like to have a similar desktop if I need to do some testing, or dev... So I don't really want to go to PC-BSD. (I also feel I'm learning more going through all the steps one by one.)


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## hukadan (Feb 11, 2015)

Hi,

If you intend to setup a FreeBSD for desktop use, I can suggest you to read this post (it is updated on a regular basis). There is a section dedicated to UTF-8 that might help you to set your computer right.

Hope it helps.


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