Problem using UTF-8 with hd-installed Knoppix

[ekalin]

I installed Knoppix 3.3 in my hd. It by default uses the "C" locale, but I want it to use en_US.UTF-8. It has support for that locale already, just setting the LANG environment variable is enough.

So far so good. But I wanted to make this changes system-wide. So I changed to /etc/sysconfig/i18n file. Here's the new file:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
COUNTRY="us"
LANGUAGE="en"
CHARSET="UTF-8"
XMODIFIERS=""

After reinstalling, a weird thing happens. When I open a program from the KDE menus (Konsole, for example), it does not use UTF-8 properly. I have some UTF-8 text in the prompt, and it appears as if it was ISO8859-1 (or -15). But the LANG environment variable is set, and the locale command shows that the correct locale has been set. If I run another Konsole from there, this second one is loaded correctly in UTF-8, with the correct fonts, etc.

The same happens for other applications: with Kedit, for example, I cannot type non ISO8859-1 characters if it is started from the KDE menu, but if it is started from a Konsole, it works correctly.

Any ideas?

[ekalin]

Well, I still haven't discovered the exact cause, but adding a

EXPORT LANG=en_US.UTF-8

in my ~/.Xsession solved the problem...