Hi, I was having trouble with the display of special characters in mutt when logged in using ssh, and I found that the LANG environment variable is the culprit.
When I use mutt from an xterm, special characters like ë, é, § for example are displayed correctly. However, after doing ssh localhost from that xterm, special characters are displayed as '?'. diff-ing the environment settings showed that from a normal xterm, LANG is unset, while from a login shell (e.g. when using ssh) LANG is set to C, whatever that means. The only place I found LANG=C appeared to be /etc/environment, and changing this to LANG='' appears to have solved the problem. But several questions remain: Why doesn't display of special characters work when LANG is set to a value? When is /etc/environment parsed? I tried su - and xterm -ls, and LANG is not set. But when I login from the console or with ssh or telnet, it is. Why is LANG set to C from /etc/environment; which package puts this in? And what does LANG=C mean to programs in general? Any pointers appreciated, Wouter
