Re: Midnight Commander jibberish in X windows

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> Problem: When I view a binary file with the internal MC editor (F3),
> scrool up and down with PGUP and PGDOWN and then press F3 again to exit,
> both panels are full with unrecognisable characters.  I took a
> screenshot: http://n3on.jelgava.lv/mc-problem.jpg

I think that telnet or ssh or whatever you are using propagates your
locale settings (usually LANG environment variable) to the remote machine.  
And the remove mc cannot work in that locale.

In particular, locales using UTF-8 encoding are not supported.  They are
not supported even by the current version, let alone 4.1.35.  Set LANG to
something sane, like C, en_US or lv_LV, or even unset it.

> The same problem is with the man pages. When I do man bash for example,
> I get the strange symbols again if I scrool up and down.

It's all problems of Red Hat 8.0, even if you login to some other machine.  
They are pushing UTF-8 to the console, and that leads to many problems.  
They may be doing a good thing in the long term, but in the short term
it's a big headache.

> The problem doesn't exist if I ssh to another PC with RH 7.2 for example
> and run MC on that comp.

Of course.

> I tried to install a different version of MC, same results. I also tried
> to compile it with --with-ncurses then with a different version of glib,
> no changes

Unfortunately, UTF-8 support is not implemented and I don't think it will
be implemented any time soon.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin