Current status

As of Hoary, there is now a package called utf8-migration-tool. Install it and run the command utf8migrationtool. It changes the users default login locale. Additionally, it searches for files in the users home directory with 8-bit characters and transforms them to utf-8.

Other tools

How do you rename filenames automatically to UTF-8 outside you home directory?

• Download the package convmv (from the universe repository) and run it like

apt-get install convmv
convmv --notest -f iso-8859-1 -t utf8 -r -i /path/to/your/files

How do you transform textfiles that contain 8-bit characters into UTF-8?

• See man page for more into on command iconv. Here is an example:

iconv -f old-encoding -t UTF-8 filename > temp.tmp && cat temp.tmp > filename && rm temp.tmp 

How do you mount vfat/ntfs/samba filesystems that contain 8-bit encoded characters?

• Options for mount command are following:

Comment

Warbo: Would this completely obliterate the AmigaOS installation that I keep in my Home directory and use with E-UAE? I am pretty sure it would, since AmigaOS doesn't use UTF-8 (at least, version 3.x doesn't and that is what I have installed) and E-UAE translates a regular ext3 folder into a partition for the emulated Amiga on-the-fly, and any filenames using foreign characters in the Amiga will always appear garbled if I go to that folder in Nautilus (which is fine, since I don't need to use Nautilus in there). Also, E-UAE's documentation says that it is not completely UTF-8 compatible. I really think things like this should be pointed out, since this page seems to be hailing UTF-8 conversion as the answer to all problems, without mentioning that it can have serious negative effects!