Language : big problems with French !! :o(

[Vincent Trouilliez]

I am desparate for a solution.

I first installed Ubuntu in English, as it just makes sense in the
computer world, or any technical domain really. But I had problems with
pretty much any and all applications. They would not display "French"
characters. For example if you look at the 'Latin 1' code page (good old
ASCII 850 table IOW), the characters we use over here are typically
characters 130 (decimal) to 140. 
Whenever I have a file name that happens to use any of these characters,
I run into problems. Depending on the app, the symptoms range from
replacing said characters with either a blank/space character, or a very
weird and ugly character, to simply NOT SHOWING the file at all
(rythmbox does that), and in case of directory names, some programs will
truncate the name and stop where the first 'french' character is
encountered, and other programs like Gnumeric, in the file chose dialog,
will simply not show the directory ! Like it didn't exist.

Funny thing is, Nautilus display everyting perfectly. 

So, I tried re-installing Ubuntu in French, but it didn't solve any of
the problems sadly !! :o(

I am very surprised of these problems, because if I believe my ASCII
tables (from an old MS-DOS 6.0 user manual... ;o), the code page 437,
used for the USA, hence english language, DOES include all the French
characters ! So it should work !! :-/  :o(((

Please help, it really doesn't look very tidy to say the least ! :o(
I think that this is a typical area where Ubuntu aims at making things
go smoothly, so hopefully a lovely developpers out there will rescue me
somehow ! :o(


Regards,

Vince, very depressed :o(