Gnucash doesn't like UTF-8, and ubuntu has only utf8 locales

Davidaf, this was with older versions of both gnucash and ubuntu. Does this still happen with latest dapper builds?

Alexandre, I've tested with Dapper updated until today (2006/04/13) and the bug persist.
After launching gnucash and openning my accounting file, I could see the problem persist. Letters like "áéíóú" disapear, so "Informática" shows as "Informtica".
Using "LANG=es_ES.ISO-8859-1 /usr/bin/gnucash" produces the following gdk error:
Gdk-WARNING **: locale not supported by C library
and programs is in English but missing letters shows again.

Running dpk-reconfigure in Dapper does not offer the option to enable more locales as did in Breezy, insteed it regenerates previously enabled locales, so I don't know how to regenereate es_ES.ISO-8859-1 again.

That's unfortunate.

For re-generating locales, the best way to ask for support is on ubuntu mailing list or #ubuntu on irc.freenode.net. But you said in your first post that you used ISO-8859-15, and now tried to use es_ES.ISO-8859-1. Does it makes any difference for you? Can't you convert this file? This bug is not likely to be fixed upstream soon...

To see a final solution I suposse the we'll have to wait to GTK-2 version of gnucash, whose develpment seems to have speeded up lately.

After trashing several hours I got it quite working in ubuntu Dapper. My language is Spanish which uses Western Eurepe charset ISO-8859-1. Since the Europen Economical Union the use of Euros, the € char was added to it, and named ISO-8859-15. So for me work with iso-8859-1 or iso-8859-15 are both acceptable solutions, with the first one lacking only € symbol.

To generate iso-8859-15 locales:
# locale-gen es_ES@euro

Using xfontsel can be seen there are few fonts installed in Dapper that include support to € symbol (iso-8859-15), so I installed Microsoft fonts:
# apt-get install msttcorefonts

After that the command to launch gnucash was:
# LANG=es_ES.ISO-8859-15@euro gnucash

I was trashing with /etc/gtk/gtkrc.iso-8859-15 to configure gtk-1 default fonts so it uses one which include iso-8859-15 charset (Arial). In gnucash Preferences I've choose Arial for ledger so it doesn't use helvetica which does not have € symbol.

For people using a more common charset generating locales and changing LANG environment variable should be enought.

Regarding converting the file I wasn't able when I tried it.

GnuCash 1.9.8 is quite stable and available from Debian Sid. This copes with UTF-8 with no problems. I've added instructions to the GnuCashHowTo in the Ubuntu wiki.

gnucash 2.0.0 is now available from edgy, and the source builds without modifications on dapper. (See bug 52486 for the request to add it to the backports repository.) Can you test this bug on the newer version? It has a wizard which provides for importing data from various locales in what should be a useful manner.

After rebuilding edgy sources in dapper, it seems to import my accounting file without problems respecting all my specific language characters (áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚüÜñÑ€).

I have only tested this new version a few minutes but as now, I think this bug can be closed once/if gnucash is backported.

Fixed in 2.0, uploaded some 6 months ago.