FIXED: Changing servers; UTF-8 breaks on new server

[hockalees]

I have an existing server running Gentoo linux and Apache 2.2.8 with 6 Joomla 1.0.x sites running on it, including sites in German, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Due to the issues with Gentoo in the news of late, we are trying to migrate to a new server running Debian. We installed Debian (w/ Apache 2.2.9) and did complete tarball copy of the Joomla sites. Both servers are running PHP5.

The problem I am getting is that the newer server is displaying boxes instead of umlautted/accented chars on the foreign language sites in the menus. When I look at the mySQL database on the new server, the data is correct. It is as if Apache is unable to serve the pages because the source in the browser is "wrong". When I go to both servers sites in FF, the encoding is UTF-8 as I would expect.

Has anyone experienced this, and how did you fix it?

[hockalees]

After going through Davidgal's UTF-8 Guide ( http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=55065 ) once again this morning, we were able to figure out the problem. I thought I would post this in case someone else ever runs into the same symptoms.

In his guide, he talks about uncommenting "includes/database.php file at about line 102". I had done that previously, however, the permissions on the file were insufficient. That is, I was root when the change was made, but the user and group permissions on the new box were right for the "user" that installed the Joomla instance on the original box. Once we mirrored the exact group and user permissions on both machines, it worked just fine.