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.