following up on debian argghh! my debian gnome terminal is UTF8 illiterate ...
Set encoding to UTF8 in gnome-terminal
gnome-terminal encoding can be set to UTF8 by default with gconftool
$ gconftool --set --type=string /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/encoding en_US.UTF-8
showunicode
gnome-terminal Unicode UTF-8
