era Now i'm using UTF-8 but russian files are maybe KOI8-R or even CP1251.
i have instal many cyrillical libs. some times they (files) look like ????? or ____ ))

jim mcnamara no i don't thik so.

I can do it when i choose Russian language in gdm and set russian locale. But Gnome will be in russian language and i don't need this.

I'am using FreeBSD7 Stable + Gnome 2.20.1