SystemRescueCd was ported to unicode (thanks to Melkor for his help). Since SystemRescueCd-1.0.2-beta4, all programs are compiled with the USE=”unicode” that is used by gentoo portage to compile the software. The new default locale is en_US.utf8. It must not be a problem to use special characters in the console under both bash and zsh. Midnight-Commander (mc) is also able to display filenames and file contents with special characters.

About the graphical environment: Unfortunately mrxvt has not been ported to unicode. This is the default terminal application in SystemRescueCd, since it comes with multiple tabs. Since there is no other multi-tabs terminal that does not requires either gnome-libs or kdelibs, we decided to keep it, and mrxvt is started with the LANG=en_US environment variable. The rxvt-unicode terminal (the gentoo package name is x11-terms/rxvt-unicode-8.3) has been added so that a terminal that supports unicode is available.

If you are using script based on an iso8859-1 text file (the old default) you will have to convert your files to unicode using iconv:
iconv -f iso88591 -t utf8 oldfile > newfile