Skip to main content

windows - How to preserve diacritics when cross-mounting drives to Windows7 and Linux


A friend backed up an in accessible Windows 7 partition to a big (close to 1TB) external USB drive using KNOPIX. Unfortunately the umlauts and accents in the file names of his extensive music collection now appear garbled (UTF8 vs ISO xxx, I guess) when he accesses that drive from Windows.


My guess is he needs to mount the two drives in a 'special way,' that takes the diacritics translation into account, on KNOPIX? Or do you have another idea what went wrong?


This is the second part of a windows/linux problem I'm having. See how-does-one-mount-a-partition-in-windows-7 for the other part



Answer



Make sure your system (Knoppix) is using an Unicode-based locale (UTF-8):



$ locale
LANG=en_US.utf-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf-8"
[skipped irrelevant settings]
LC_ALL=

If the LANG or LC_CTYPE variables do not end in .utf-8 (or .utf8), fix them:




  1. run locale -a and make sure it lists the needed locale (i.e. en_US.utf-8);




  2. if the locale is not listed, uncomment it in /etc/locale.gen:


    en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

    and run locale-gen as root;




  3. run export LANG="en_US.utf-8"




  4. run (xterm &) or (gnome-terminal &) to start a new terminal with the new settings applied;




  5. close the old terminal. (It is not enough to change $LANG for the current shell.)




In the new terminal, verify output of locale and check whether it fixes your problem.


Also make sure your filesystem driver is using UTF-8. The NTFS filesystem uses Unicode exclusively, but if you mounted it while having an incorrect locale, the driver might be in a translation mode. Unmount the filesystem and mount it again, while having a correct $LANG. If even that does not help, try adding the utf8 and iocharset=utf8 options to mount...


# mount -t ntfs -o utf8,iocharset=utf8 /dev/foo /mnt

...or switch to the ntfs-3g driver:


# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/foo /mnt

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

keyboard - Is there any utility/method to change Windows key bindings to type rare chars to currently empty bindings?

I'm currently typing this post with my windows XP machine and (Spanish) keyboard, and I'd like to add some extra symbols to my text. I could open the "char map" windows utility, look for the desired symbols, and paste them. But I'd like something quickier. For example, when I'm using my OSX Mac at work, I can easily add a ©, ™, ® or similar symbols, just pressing some weird ALT-GR + G / H / J, key combinations. In my (Spanish) keyboard mapping, these combinations are empty, as they don't produce any char at all, which, on the other hand, is perfectly normal and desirable. So, I thought: Why couldn't I add some extra key mappings on top of my currently empty ALT-GR + G/J/H Keys in my Spanish keyboard, and thus, being able to quickly type these special symbols? So that's my question: Is there any utility/method to achieve that effect under windows? (My version is XP). I've even googled this for some time but no luck. I've been a long term Hot...
Post a Comment
Read more

virtualization - How to select paravirtualization interface in VirtualBox?

Given a windows 8 host system (Intel Core i5) and a Linux Fedora host, I would like to determine the optimal setting for the paravirtual interface. Options are none Default Legacy minimal Hyper-V KVM This page suggest the selection is only based on the guest system: The biggest change in VirtualBox 5.0 is the introduction of paravirtualization support, bringing higher performance and time-keeping accuracy to supported guest operating systems (Hyper-V on Windows and KVM on Linux). Is that correct? Answer The VirtualBox Manual , in the section titled Paravirtualization providers explains very clearly when each should be used (emphasis added): Minimal: Announces the presence of a virtualized environment. Additionally, reports the TSC and APIC frequency to the guest operating system. This provider is mandatory for running any Mac OS X guests. KVM: Presents a Linux KVM hypervisor interface which is recognized by Linux kernels starting with version 2.6.25. VirtualBox's implementati...
Post a Comment
Read more

macos - Visit URL in running Firefox instance from command line in OS X

I have Firefox 3.6 installed on my OS X (10.6) box. I would like to open an URL in the running Firefox instance (in a new tab or window, no matter) from the command line. I tried several ways, neither switches -new-tab , -new-window , -url , or none helped me. I always get the A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time. error message. Answer running open http://www.superuser.com from the command line will (at least for me) open a new tab to superuser.com in firefox (which is my default browser)
Post a Comment
Read more

security - How is Linux not prone to viruses, malware and those kinds of things?

How is Linux protected against viruses? This question was a Super User Question of the Week . Read the blog entry for more details or contribute to the blog yourself Answer Well, it factually is not... it's just less subject to hackers developing viruses that target Linux systems. Consumer grade computers usually run on Windows and thus, when targeting a wide audience, Windows is the way to go. Don't misunderstand Linux and viruses, there definitely ARE Linux viruses. Some distros have additional protection layers such as SELinux (See here ) in Ubuntu for example. Then there's the default firewall and the fact that alien files don't automatically have permission to be executed. Specific execution permission has to be granted before execution is possible. (See here ) Then there are several other factors that make Linux a hard place to be for viruses usually non-root users on linux systems have no to little executable files at their disposal that would allow for virus...
Post a Comment
Read more