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This short guide will tell you how to configure irssi so that it will keep showing ISO-8859-15 (or whatever you select) charset letters in terminal no matter what the other users on the channel are using. This way you won't need to worry anymore about UTF-8 junk messing with your terminal that uses ISO-8859-15 or the other way around. Here are the needed irssi commands:
/set termcharset ISO-8859-15
/set recodefallback ISO-8859-15
/set recodeoutdefaultcharset ISO-8859-15
/set recodetransliterate on
/set recodeautodetectutf8 on
/set recode on
/save
That should do it. There's no need to restart irssi assuming the terminal is really using the same charset as set in the term_charset variable. Further explanations about those commands can be obtained with
/help recode
The purpose of this page is to describe how UTF-8 can be disable in Ubuntu / Debian console. At least Ubuntu releases starting from Dapper have UTF-8 enabled by default after a clean install has been done. Checking the current status is simple:
$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
If the result is anything else than en_US.UTF-8 then UTF-8 shouldn't be enabled and there's no point in reading the rest of this page unless generating locales is the point of interest.
Open /etc/environment as root (so that you can edit it) and it should by default look something like this:
PATH="/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11"
LANG="enUS.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_FI:en"
The LANGUAGE setting depends of what you have selected during the beginning of the install process and usually doesn't nee to be changed. Remove UTF-8 from the LANG setting so that after editing that line will look like:
LANG="en_US"
Save the changes and close the file. Also check the content of /etc/default/locale if it exists and make the same change. At least in Gutsy it seems to override settings from the environment file. Next it's time to generate some new locales because en_US doesn't probably exist yet. Open /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local and if will look like:
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
and make it look like:
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
Also any other locale that needs to be generated should be added to that file. For example Finnish users might want to have fi_FI ISO-8859-1 in there too. Remeber to save the file after editing.
Now it's time to generate those new locales. As usual, run the following as root.
$ locale-gen Generating locales...
... Generation complete.
local-gen will list all locales included in /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local and generate those if necessary. Finally just log out and back in again. UTF-8 should now be disabled. That can be checked in the same way we started:
$ echo $LANG
en_US