BeOS don't support locales now, but is considered as Unix in intl sence. So all locale-codeset-charset functions tends to fall back to ISO-****-1 case. It seems wrong in general, because native and only proper internal charset for BeOS is UTF-8. It seems affecting xpcom/io functions. Probably this may be workarounded in configure process by adding BeOS (all UTF-8) cases in unixcharset.properties, but i'm not sure.

to the primary beos owner.

it seems that setting of environment variables at posix level for LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGE lacks any effect. In upcoming BeOS versions, like Zeta Neo and (maybe, maybe) Haiku, those variables will be in use in form ??_??.UTF-8 with possibility to switch between locales at runtime. So things need further investigation

Setting export LANG=xx_XX in /boot/home/config/boot/UserSetupEnvironment followed by a restart does have the desired effect. More here: http://prognathous.mail-central.com/prognathous/mozilla/beos/BeOS_Locale.html Prog.

according to another BEOS bug " We removed what code we had in the tree for BeOS support several months ago"