[all2ofme]

I've made a few DVDs recently in Toast 5.2.3 under 10.3.7 and while I can copy files correctly from them to my linux box (Debian Sarge - have tried ReiserFS and Ext3), those files that have unusual characters such as ����� etc. don't show their correct names (either before or after the copy).

I've tried 8859-1, 8859-15 and UTF-8 for various locales and that doesn't seem to make a difference.

Does anyone have an idea as to how to fix this? My last linux install (Suse 9.1) was fine at fixing this. Not sure what the difference is, though. Any help'd be much appreciated!

[Gavin]

You can copy them so it IS reading the filesystem.

Maybe your linux box doesn't have a font that can display the mac codes. Try those same chars inside a text file and see if the linux box can display them. I'd try both a GUI text editor and vi.

Can you transfer files with accent chars over file sharing, NFS , netatalk, samba, FTP? How about with a CD?

[all2ofme]

Thanks for the reply. Some good things to try First, best probably to say that I have the locale set to ISO-8859-1 at the moment.

<deep breath>

1) The linux box does have a font that displays those characters ok. If I type them in myself all is well (at least in Gnome - the Terminal still doesn't display them correctly). Samba also seems to translate them correctly - they appear ok in OS X.

2) I tried two text files. One was a text file from linux that I moved onto my PB (ssh and ftp - same results for both). This one was the same as above. Characters are ok within gedit, but not in the terminal or vi. Interestingly, the characters don't display correctly in that text file on my Powerbook after Samba and FTP have had their mitts on them.

3) The second text file was one I did in Textedit and moved to the linux box. Displayed perfectly in all respects. This suggests to me that it's in mounting the DVDs/CDs that linux goes wrong. Does that sound like a reasonable assessment?

4) Transmit (FTP) seems to work fine in all cases that Gnome displays things properly, *except* for the contents of the first text file.

5) Transferring files with accent characters is fine with samba and ftp - as long as the files were displaying correctly in Gnome beforehand. Haven't tried the others, though (didn't need to with Suse - all was fine there).

6) CDs are the same as DVDs.

I've done a bit of googling and found that SuSe 9.1 (the one I had previously) uses UTF-8 encoding by default. Debian uses ISO-8859-1, and I've left it that way with this installation (for now, at least):

http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~gar...WTO/howto.html

...on how to install UTF encoding on Debian and did that without any problems. Same problem persisted, though, the characters still displayed incorrectly - just differently. Before switching to UTF the problem characters displayed as squares with four digit codes inside (for example what should have been an � displayed as:

00
94

...when read from top left to bottom right) in Gnome and KDE. In the terminal they display as question marks. After switching to Unicode they display as space characters and "(Invalid Unicode)" is appended to the filename.

Sooo, after more Googling, I found this:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/...codingWithI18N

Seems that Apple use NFD encoding whereas most Unices seem to use NFC. Still, it wasn't a problem with Suse. If I can get that behaviour back again I'll be happy!