Chris Travers <chris(dot)travers(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> As for whether UTF-8 is the default, it is in many cases, but I remember
> struggling with the fact that a few Linux distros still default to
> SQL-ASCII. Ultimately this is something of a packaging issue and the
> default may be set at the package level.
Actually, the default is taken from the locale environment that initdb
sees. So it's a question of what the distro initializes LANG to (and
whether you've changed that, either system-wide or for the postgres user).
regards, tom lane