utf-8 typing problem in X

Carlo Nyto carlonyto at gmail.com
Fri Nov 7 17:49:50 UTC 2008


I have a problem with Fedora 9 - if I type in X, whether it is in a
firefox window, a gaim window, an xterm, a gnome-terminal, a gvim
window, it will randomly switch to some Unicode part of the character
set. The text is still legible, however it is rendered wrong (with
unnecessary space after each character). Besides being hard to read,
it makes it impossible to program, and impossible to guarantee that
the recipient of a message will have the ability to properly view the
text. I have found no way to switch back, however on occasion it will
do so randomly.

It resets back to normal if I close and re-open the window. Typing in
a browser window is a simply terrible idea. I have taken to typing in
a gvim window, and restarting gvim when the keyboard input switches. I
have found no way to convert the text to the proper part of the
character set, and cut-n-paste preserves the problem. I've also
mitigated it somewhat by only using windows, not tabs, with firefox.

The real mistake was using Fedora 9 in the first place, but I had no
idea how bad it would be - between problems like this that are
impossible to troubleshoot, and an X server that won't listen on TCP
without me making source changes. While the quality of Fedora 9 has
made it clear to me that I should never use Fedora again, I still am
stuck using it for a few days.

This is how it looks after getting in that state. You see how much
Iwas able to type until the problem reoccurred. And this time, I was
lucky that it went back to normal quite quickly.  A capital T is, in
hex, ef bc b4.

I'm disappointed that Fedora is becoming less usable with each
release. At work we're a RedHat customer, and if Fedora is really the
beta(or even alpha) test for RedHat, I'm quite concerned for the
future of Linux in the enterprise. Still, I'm going to not personally
worry about this, and switch to Ubuntu soon.




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