no unicode in user

[waslap]

i seem to have a problem with getting unicode( any ) to work on my user account. The strange thing is that my root account seems to be just fine. Running gucharmap in my user account gives with scrabble but in root it works fine. Is there some restriction which I must turn off or on that will enable me to see unicode in my user account. even browsing websites makes firefox crash, but not in root.
thanks

[devil_ua]

[waslap]

I'm user locale en_US.UTF-8
I think I'm using a system wide locale, but obviously it isn't working.
I"m not writing anything in rc.conf for locale support, must I?
I'm doing an export LANG="en_US.UTF-8" in /etc/profile.

[linfan]

Finally!

I am also struggling with unicode systemwide settings. I can get it to work, but when I log in, I lose the command prompt and have to do ctrl+c to get it visible, and then all bootup text turns into jibberish. The color settings also change.

I tried to make my system use unicode according to this doc: http://www.gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Make_your_system_use_unicode/utf-8

I do, however, not understand what the flag "-u" means in KEYMAP="-u sv-latin1"

It would also be good to know, if it makes any difference whether you use the .utf8 or .UTF-8 extension in /etc/env.d/02locale

I have changed the locale settings in /etc/env.d/02locale, but the bootup still acts weird.

The settings I changed in /etc/rc.conf are:

KEYMAP="-u sv-latin1"
UNICODE="yes"
SET_WINDOWKEYS="yes" (also tried with "no", which seemed to be the default)
CONSOLETRANSLATION="8859-1_to_uni"

The consolefont I use is: CONSOLEFONT="lat9w-16"

I would be very pleased to learn more about the proper way to set up unicode on the system. I am an esperantist, too, and would appreciate to be able to use some extra characters, which I have put into my home directory in .Xmodmap.

[devil_ua]