Unicode Text on Linux and WindowsXP

[Panos Laganakos]

> First, how did you get windows to read/write data to an ext3 filesystem?

I installed IFS[1] in order to be able to view the ext3 partition, and
be able to mount it in a Directory Drive.

> Surely it is due to the two systems not using the same encoding for
> the characters.
>
> Background:
> The basic uint of data computers process is a 'byte'.  The problem is
> that a byte is not able to uniquely represent every character of every
> language in the world.  Unicode specifies a unique value for each
> character of each language, but does so using 2 bytes per character.
> Thus some mechanism must be used to encode these sequences of 2-byte
> values as sequences of individual bytes.  UTF-8 is one such encoding
> (the most commonly used)
>
> Hopefully this will help point you in the right direction.  I have
> never used non-ASCII characters in file names.  Furthermore, I have
> not been able to find any way of changing Windows to use UTF-8 instead
> of CP1252.

Thanks for the info, that helped me fix some issues I had with NTFS
mounted partitions. I had to pass iocharset=utf8 in the mounting
(/etc/fstab) and now, I'm able to view greek spelled directories.

Still I haven't been able to make windows or linux be able to read
each other's chars right. I suppose since its ext3, it should use the
same codepage, so it might be windows/IFS fault. Still not sure how to
overcome this, I might have to contact IFS project.

[1]IFS = http://www.fs-driver.org/