display unicode characters on red hat server

Question

I get junk characters instead of UTF‐8–encoded Unicode characters on the screen when I connect to my server from Windows 7 machine. I use Secure CRT and Putty. English text has no issues.

I will like to know if it is possible to display and sort those words (Indian Language) My Server is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.4 (Tikanga)

Answer 1

Tell your client to use UTF-8.

Answer 2

To see unicode characters in Putty, please go in:

Change settings -> Window -> Translation -> choose UTF8 as Remote character set.

Then you should be able to see Chinese ideograms, Esperanto supersigns, Hindi, Arabian, Hebrew, Corean, Greek... :)

If you cannot, probably the problem is in your server.

You can install the missing fonts by command line from repositorium. Example for Japanese in RedHat (for other distributions, there should be a similar way):

yum groupinstall Japanese Support

Or by GUI, if you have access to it.

If you don't have access to any repositorium or installation disk, you can follow manual installation here:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/International_Language_Support_Guide/add_fonts_all_users.html

Or use a similar guide for your Linux distribution.

Example if you have the rpm files (NOTE: the last part of the name is the version, it can change that is not important):

# general for Unicode:
rpm -Uvh libXext-1.3.3-3.el7.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-fonts-Type1-7.5-9.el7.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh libXrender-0.9.8-2.1.el7.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi-7.5-9.el7.noarch.rpm

#Most of "small" alphabets (cirillic, greek, latin, hebrew...) are in dejavu
rpm -Uvh dejavu-fonts-common-2.33-6.el7.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh dejavu-lgc-sans-mono-fonts-2.30-2.el6.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh dejavu-sans-fonts-2.30-2.el6.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh dejavu-sans-mono-fonts-2.30-2.el6.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh dejavu-serif-fonts-2.30-2.el6.noarch.rpm

#chinese, japanese, (also korean, but this one won't work, see following)
rpm -Uvh cjkuni-uming-fonts-0.2.20080216.1-53.el7.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh cjkuni-ukai-fonts-0.2.20080216.1-51.el7.noarch.rpm

#To work, korean needs the followings:
rpm -Uvh libFS-1.0.0-3.1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh chkfontpath-1.10.1-1.1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-xfs-1.0.2-5.el5_6.1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -Uvh fonts-korean-1.0.11-10.el5.noarch.rpm

#Hindi needs the following...
rpm -Uvh fonts-hindi-2.3.1.1-2.el5.noarch.rpm

#when you installed new font packages you MUST run (else they won't work unytill computer restart):
sudo fc-cache -f -v

Remember when you install any system, to install as many languages as possible: it costs only some space and it can avoid many problems. We live in a world where basic Latin alfabet is not enough.