do i have to recompile it?
i figured out diffent ways of setting the character set values see
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset.html
but starting it with other values or my.cnf settings changed nothing. Because if i do:
sudo mysqld --verbose --help | grep charact
it always answers me latin1 as standard charset. the system is ubuntu lts server with a standard mysql install.
add this into my.cnf:
[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=utf8
[mysql]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
[mysqladmin]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
[mysqlcheck]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
[mysqldump]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
[mysqlimport]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
[mysqlshow]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
#end