Here is a 3 minute demonstration on how to use Unicode under Linux.
Give it a try!

1) Make sure you have a recent Linux distribution installed. You should
   have glibc 2.2 and XFree86 4.0 or newer (e.g., SuSE or RedHat Linux 7.1
   or newer), otherwise your system lacks

     - UTF-8 locale support
     - ISO 10646-1 fonts
     - the new UTF-8 enabled xterm

   (UTF-8 is the ASCII-compatible encoding in which Unicode is now
   commonly used on POSIX systems.)

2) Test whether you have a UTF-8 locale installed. For example if you
   use bash, then

     $ LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 locale charmap
     UTF-8

   confirms that you have a locale named en_GB.UTF-8 available that uses
   the UTF-8 encoding. ("locale -a" lists all available locales,
   "man localedef" explains how to generate locale definition files.)

3) Open an xterm in UTF-8 mode by selecting a UTF-8 locale and
   an ISO10646-1 font, for example

     $ LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 xterm \
         -fn '-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1'

4) Download some example UTF-8 plaintext file such as "UTF-8-demo.txt" from

     http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/

   (Save to disk directly such that your web browser has no chance to mess
   the file up by attempting some charset conversion.)

5) Display it in the UTF-8 xterm with "cat" or "less". You should see the
   plain text with lots of nice non-ASCII characters, as in

     http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/xterm-UTF-8-demo.gif

6) If that got you interested and you want to learn more on Unicode/UTF-8
   under Linux and Unix, please read

     http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

   You will find there information on how UTF-8 works, which popular
   editors support it already and what you should know about it as
   a developer to make your applications ready for it.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain