[CentOS] Correctly displaying different charsets in Gnome-Terminal

Sun Nov 18 12:36:19 UTC 2007
Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net>

Hi,

I'm using CentOS 5.0 with GNOME on almost all my desktops. My system is 
in french, so the default charset ($LANG) is fr_FR.UTF-8.

I'm in charge of our public library database server, running Debian 
Sarge. It's mainly running a LAMP server with a few extra PHP modules, 
and it's hosting our library management software. Since the app refuses 
to work correctly with UTF-8, I set the general system locale on the 
server to fr_FR at euro (ISO-8859-1).

When I administrate that server remotely from, say, a desktop running 
Slackware (which defaults to ISO, not Unicode), characters in the 
console get displayed correctly. For example, 'less /root/ChangeLog.txt' 
will display my ChangeLog file (with french special characters) 
correctly. But when I open an SSH session on my CentOS machine in a 
GNOME Terminal, the french special characters are all replaced by 
inverted question marks. And the same goes for the MySQL monitor: all 
the french characters in the entries (é, à, ç, ù, ...) are incorrectly 
displayed.

Q: how can I display all that correctly from within my Gnome Terminal?

cheers,

Niki Kovacs