Bugzilla – Bug 1030696
Corrupted 'Umlauts' when disk is mounted by root
Last modified: 2018-04-10 08:58:22 UTC
I want to restore user settings from an old harddrive. I noticed that if root mounts the drive (via KDE desktop), all special characters (ä, ü, ß) are corrupted. If normal user mounts the drive, everything looks OK. If running dolphin in superuser-mode, everything is OK as well. Same applies if root logs into Plasma session: Start dolphin, /home/docb/Arbeitsfläche is corrupted settings in /etc/sysconfig/language are: RC_LANG = de_DE.UTF-8 RC_LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8" ROOT_USES_LANG="ctype" -> Value "ctype" means that root uses just LC_CTYPE.
I feel it is more related to the handling of the variables in /etc/sysconfig/language: Settings in /etc/sysconfig/language: INPUT_METHOD="" RC_LANG="de_DE.UTF-8" RC_LC_ALL="" RC_LC_MESSAGES="" RC_LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8" RC_LC_COLLATE="" RC_LC_TIME="" RC_LC_NUMERIC="" RC_LC_MONETARY="" RC_LC_PAPER="" ROOT_USES_LANG="ctype" AUTO_DETECT_UTF8="no" INSTALLED_LANGUAGES="de_DE" Definition for RC_LC_CTYPE: # This defines the locale for character handling and classification. # The libc uses this value in language dependent function calls, such # as e.g. uppercase/lowercase mapping of foreign characters. and ROOT_USES_LANG: # This defines if the user "root" should use the locale settings # which are defined here. # Value "ctype" means that root uses just LC_CTYPE. # Value "yes" means that root uses the full settings.. So, in theory, root should use de_DE.UTF-8 as well. In fact he does not. I changed the value to 'yes', and in this case the RC_Lang for root is set to UTF-8. Everything is good. This leads to 2 conclusions: - an expert should have a look at the language settings, how ROOT_USES_LANG is supposed to work - for non-English installations, ROOT_USES_LANG="yes" is probably the better default.