5.8 German umlaut oddities

[MatthiasKoch]

Good morning all, I am new to this forum. I have been using and managing Linux (mostly GNU) computers and networks since 1997 both professionally and for non-profit. Being more and more unhapy with the recent changes in Linux I am looking for an alternative, and OpenBSD looks promising.

Here's the first issue I have come accross: when editing files from the console (e. g. with joe) or ssh'ing to other computers, German umlauts are not displayed correctly. Meaning to say, they do appear properly when I'm typing them, but in text files that have been written in, say, CentOS, they are displayed with all forms of foreign characters. Same goes for terminal feedback from other computers (CentOS). Apparently this is not happening when communicating with another OpenBSD machine. It looks like OpenBSD and Linux have different concepts of terminal settings. I admit that I'm a bit ignorant about terminals, I've always taken it as a given that they'd work as I expected).

See for a typical example. The textfile has been written with joe on a CentOS machine, then copied to the BSD machine and opened with joe again.


These are the machines I've been using:

OpenBSD 5.8 (GENERIC.MP) #1236: Sun Aug 16 02:31:04 MDT 2015
deraadt@amd64.openbsd.org:/usr/src/s...ile/GENERIC.MP
real mem = 4278059008 (4079MB)
avail mem = 4144513024 (3952MB)
mpath0 at root
scsibus0 at mpath0: 256 targets
mainbus0 at root
bios0 at mainbus0: SMBIOS rev. 2.4 @ 0xe0010 (364 entries)
bios0: vendor Phoenix Technologies LTD version "6.00" date 04/14/2014
bios0: VMware, Inc. VMware Virtual Platform


Linux version 3.10.0-327.3.1.el7.x86_64 (builder@kbuilder.dev.centos.org) (gcc version 4.8.3 20140911 (Red Hat 4.8.3-9) (GCC) ) #1 SMP Wed Dec 9 14:09:15 UTC 2015
Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-3.10.0-327.3.1.el7.x86_64 root=/dev/mapper/centos_jarvis-root ro crashkernel=auto rd.lvm.lv=centos_jarvis/swap rd.lvm.lv=centos_jarvis/root rhgb quiet LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 systemd.debug


TIA
Matthias

[J65nko]

I am Dutch and use a US keyboard layout, so I have not one of these problems. But ....

CentOS uses UTF-8 encoding, while OpenBSD does not. Even some man pages from CentOS have strange characters when I ssh from OpenBSD to a CentOS KVM instance.
Using uxterm(1) solves that for me. From such an uxterm

$ env | grep -i utf
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
XTERM_LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8

In a standard xterm(1) those environment variables are:

$ env | egrep 'CTYPE|LOCALE'
XTERM_LOCALE=C

The OpenBSD FAQ has a section about localization. See 10.10 - Character sets and localization

[MatthiasKoch]

Dank u well for clarification, J65nko, this was the relevant line I had somehow missed:

"When logging into remote systems with ssh(1), the LC_CTYPE environment variable is not propagated and will need to be manually set to the same value used by the local terminal."

I was getting more and more confused because I was aware of the CTYPE issue and hat already set the values correctly. What I had not thought of was that those settings are omitted when logging in through SSH. As the machines in question are VMs, I log in through Xming (already set correctly, hence the issue didn't come up in the X environment which added to my confusion) - , and, of course, through ssh...

So, adding this line to ~/.ssh/rc on the BSD machine seems to work:
export LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"


Thank you very much again
Matthias