[ILUG] Characterset problems?

[Brendan Halpin]

My Knoppix/Debian setup is steadily settling down[1], but I am having
a strange problem with certain programs outputting garbage:
characters replaced with question-marks. This happens under X and
in the console. adduser is a particular problem: once it starts to
ask for secondary info (I think, I can't read it!) like real name,
the prompts are all ???????. 

If it was an X problem I would start looking for X fonts, but since
it's in the console too, I'm confused. Moreover, if I run the
program under an emacs shell, emacs tells me the character actually
is "?" and not something else for which it doesn't have a glyph.

Pointers?


Regards,

Brendan

[1] Knoppix installed on SATA for me, then I did a load of
repartitioning and thanks to a fruitful thread on cp/tar/rsync got
everything where I wanted (took me a while to see that a read-only
/tmp was a bad idea), figured out how to get the defective A03 bios
to cooperate with Xfree86 to give me better than 640X480, and began
to understand app-get, update-rc.d et alia. 
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-390476; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin at ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html