A.7.15 When I'm connected to a Red Hat Linux 8.0 system, some characters don't display properly.

A common complaint is that hyphens in man pages show up as a-acute.

With release 8.0, Red Hat appear to have made UTF-8 the default character set. There appears to be no way for terminal emulators such as PuTTY to know this (as far as we know, the appropriate escape sequence to switch into UTF-8 mode isn't sent).

A fix is to configure sessions to RH8 systems to use UTF-8 translation - see section 4.10.1 in the documentation. (Note that if you use ‘Change Settings’, changes may not take place immediately - see question A.7.7.)

If you really want to change the character set used by the server, the right place is /etc/sysconfig/i18n, but this shouldn't be necessary.