Since upgrading to GNOME 2.14, I have been revisited by an annoying
problem with gnome-terminal. Gnome-terminal sets your character encoding
to being the same as your locale by default, which unfortunately was
being detected as ANSI_X3.4-1968, while I had my $LANG set to
en_GB.UTF-8 in my ~/.bash_profile. The reason it wasn’t being
detected was because nothing between logging in and starting
gnome-terminal looked at that file, so gnome-terminal thought the locale
was C.

The result was corrupt
display when programs attempted to display unicode characters. I could
fix it by changing the character encoding using the menu, but I’d have
to do this for every tab, which quickly becomes annoying. Time to find a
fix.

Turns out that you need to tell gdm to set the right locale, which
you can do by configuring ~/.dmrc. Mine now looks like:

[Desktop]
Session=gnome
Language=en_GB.UTF-8

Obviously, the important section is the Language line. You
need to set it to a locale that exists on your system, which you can
find using locale -a. Once
you’ve set that and logged in again, everything should be working
correctly.