The Linux Counter changes character set

The Linux Counter has been running for 10 years with the "ISO 8859-1" character set. In 1993, this was the only reasonable character set to choose; in 2004, it is clearly insufficient to represent the names of people and places registered in the Linux Counter.

It also makes sense that the Linux Counter should reflect the fact that Linux is one of the most internationalized and globalized systems out there!

Therefore, the Linux Counter is converting its internal data representation and its web pages to the character set that today comes closest to being an "universal" character set: Unicode - in particular, the UTF-8 representation of Unicode.

We expect some "teething problems" during the changeover, but expect that these will all be solved before 2005 has gone very far.

This is also a key component in making it possible to translate the Linux Counter's user interface into multiple languages.