To set up a Debian Linux machine to handle UTF-8 in a shell or console app do the following.
First, use dselect or whatever tool you like to find the Japanese font packages for X and install em.
Then run
dpkg-reconfigure locales
then choose en_US.UTF-8
Test by executing the folowing in a shell:
locale charmap
it should say
UTF-8
If not try just
locale
it should have UTF-8 for everything like:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NUMERIC=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TIME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MONETARY=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_PAPER=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_NAME=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ADDRESS=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_TELEPHONE=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_MEASUREMENT=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_IDENTIFICATION=”en_US.UTF-8″
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
if not then Add the follwoing to .bashrc and re-source it (e.g. get a new login shell, or execute bash)
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
then try
locale charmap
or
locale
once that is all set to UTF-8 then change your shells (xterm, rxvt) to use:
uxterm
urxvt
That is it. I had to exit X11 and re-login to get X11 to take these settings
so that clicking my icon for xterm launched uxterm WITH the correct environment
After this all console apps that can handle UTF-8 (like vim) display UTF-8
characters correctly.