this is obsolete doc -- see http://doc.nethence.com/ instead

UTF-8 system configuration 

Introduction 

A few tricks to use UTF-8 efficiently. 

Misc 

To connect with PuTTY, use those options, 

Window > Translation > character set : UTF-8

For GNU screen, 

screen -U

Vim configuration 

No colors and enable filetypes, 

cd ~/

cat > .vimrc <<EOF9

syn off

filetype plugin indent on

EOF9

Configure filetypes, 

mkdir -p .vim/after/ftplugin

cd .vim/after/ftplugin

cat > sh.vim <<EOF9

setlocal autoindent

EOF9

cat > html.vim <<EOF9

setlocal autoindent

setlocal shiftwidth=1

setlocal fileencoding=utf-8

EOF9

ln -s html.vim jsp.vim

ln -s sh.vim ksh.vim

Note. alternatively only into .vimrc, 

autocmd FileType html   set autoindent

autocmd FileType html   set shiftwidth=1

autocmd FileType html   set fileencoding=utf-8

Redhat specifics 

UTF8 is already the default charater set on RHEL3,4,5, 

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Note. RHEL3,4 : /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8 

Note. RHEL5 : /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8 

References 

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/utf-8.xml 

http://www.maruko.ca/i18n/