With the steps following you should get Ruby/Rails up running with Unicode (UTF8) support. I used MySQL under debian/etch and ferret for full text searching.

Configuring Linux

1. Run ‘dpkg-reconfigure locales’ and be sure to configure de_DE.UTF-8@euro
2. Set de_DE.UTF-8@euro as system-default

Configuring MySQL

1. In /etc/mysql/my.cnf set ‘default-character-set = utf8′ within the [mysqld] section
2. Set ‘default-character-set = utf8′ in [mysql] section also
3. Set Database and Table Collation to ‘utf8_unicode_ci’. (Good introduction is available at julik.textdriven.com and at wiki.rubyonrails.org) (more…)