> Glibc is good, but what about wide char, unicode etc.. etc.. etc.. ad biggum.

Glibc does wide char, ncurses seems to imply it does (I've not 
checked yet). 

> toward.  Is there any interest in what we have thus far at Xi?

Well I know the currnt KDE doesnt handle 16bit Glyphs, Im not sure about
the Gtk toolkit on that.

> (hint to some: code pages work only for vts)

Depends on your Xterminal and fonts ;)

The kernel itself uses UTF8 for file names so you can reasonably keep
a Klingon ext2fs if you wish.