Unicode Text on Linux and WindowsXP

[Panos Laganakos]

Update:
After reading IFS's Troubleshooting page, it seems that the current
version doesn't support utf-8.

Quoted from their site:
" When I access to an Ext2/Ext3 volume on Windows, file names with
language-specific characters appear distorted.

It is probably caused by an activated UTF-8 encoding in your Linux
installation. You may check it by the locale tool (on Linux):
locale
When it outputs something, which ends with "utf8" in the line
"LC_CTYPE=", UTF-8 encoding is enabled. Unfortunately, the current
version of the Ext2 IFS software does not support UTF-8 encoded file
names. (The driver always uses the current code page of Windows.) "

On 1/26/06, Panos Laganakos <panos.laganakos at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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/
>