Comment 2 for bug 211710

This is a known issue with XaoS on modern Linux systems. See the following bug in our tracker: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1188322&group_id=5771&atid=105771

The problem is that XaoS's built-in text system can't handle UTF-8. It expects the text to be returned in Latin 1 or Latin 2, depending on the language, but Ubuntu and most other modern systems don't have these locales installed anymore. There is a workaround described in section 6 of the i18n README file: http://xaos.cvs.sourceforge.net/xaos/XaoS/src/i18n/README?revision=1.7&view=markup

Is adding support for the needed locales this something that could be addressed by the packager? I'm the Mac OS X maintainer, so I don't know a whole lot about debian packages.

A possible fix might be to put some function call to convert the text from UTF-8 returned by gettext to Latin 1 or 2 as appropriate before passing it into the text handling routine, but I have not looked into this.

Another possible fix (which would require a lot more work) is to replace XaoS's antiquated text system with the text drawing in a modern UI toolkit like gtk or qt. However, a prerequisite for this would be to write a new user interface for GTK or QT (easier than it sounds because of XaoS's portability framework, but still quite a bit of work). This is the approach I am taking for the Cocoa UI that I have written for Mac OS X. The menus and dialogs already handle UTF-8 correctly since they are native Mac OS X menus. However, the messages displayed on screen still go through XaoS's built-in text handling system and therefore don't show up correctly. The solution will be to replace calls to the built-in text handler with calls to the UI's text drawing functions. I'm not sure how much work that will be... possibly quite a bit.