Unicode is unicrap

[m33sb3w]

I've been working for days trying to make my system capable of accepting/displaying cyrillic. I use mostly English but I also need to be able to type in Russian sometimes. I've read and re-read all the documents that I could find on the web and the threads on these forums but nothing works. I have several unicode fonts installed. I have the encoding settings in my kernel. I've tried with several different encodings, but most recently I've been working on getting unicode to work. It took me hours to get the computer to think about using anything else than "iso88595-1". I tried creating an en_US.UTF-8 locale and put that in my 02locale file under LC_CTYPE along with en_US under LANG. Now, even though the command "locale charmap" doesn't say "iso88595-1" it still is all borked because it says "ANSI_X3.4-1968" And when I run a applications it tells me that it isn't a known type. Can ANYONE help me out with this. I normally have patience with problems and I work until I fix them but this is getting ridiculous. Some distros do this sort of thing out of the box. In my opinion, any distro that wants to be a frontrunner should make internationalization (both picking one language for the distro AND allowing users to work with more than one language) easier than this.

[rounin]

So you've installed Unicode fonts. That's good.

To use Cyrillic in Qt or GTK+:
1. Start a proram that uses Qt or GTK+.

I suggest using Qt or GTK+. GTK+ also has a Cyrillic input method that you can use just under GTK+ by right-cklicking on an input area.

To use Cyrillic in other programs:
1. USE="nls" emerge libc (Takes a while)
2. Make sure you have a locale that supports Cyrillic, either in UTF-8 or a local encoding. If not, generate one with localedef
3. Start the program in your locale.