Swedish characters in Ubuntu (svenska tecken (åäö) i konsolen)

When ssh'ing to an Ubuntu box running a default English installation, Swedish characters wouldn't work in the console. I fixed it by adding the following to /etc/profile:

export LANG="en_US.utf8"

That was enough. You can also play with with the various LC_ variables to modify behaviour. Run locale to see the current settings. If you want a Swedish locale but it's not available, try locale-gen sv_SE.utf8 and dpkg-reconfigure locales.

If you happen to be using PuTTY, you might also have to change the encoding sometimes. Right-click on the window's title bar, choose Change settings and go to Window -> Translation and change "Character set translation on received data" to UTF-8.

2010-11-30 · ubuntu · swedish · encoding