Unicode Text on Linux and WindowsXP

[Derrick Hudson]

On 1/25/06, Panos Laganakos <panos.laganakos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, I am faced with an issue that came up recently.
>
> I decided to make a small partition for my music on a local HDD  and I
> set it up to use ext3 FS.

Ok.

> Problem is that Greek text that was written on Windows appears as
> gibberish (regarding directories/files) on Ubuntu/Linux, and vice versa.

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

> Any idea why this is happening? And which OS's fault is it? It could be
> mine I suppose :) Maybe I need to install something to better support
> greek chars coming from a windows accessible directory?

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.

-D