[Linux] Text encoding

I recently had a problem with special Portuguese characters and latex.
The problem is that the input must be in latin1 encoding, and I was
using utf-8 to edit an input file. It took me quite a while to figure
out why latex would not compile my recently edited file, but would
nicely compile my old files written in Portuguese. The error I was
getting was:

"Command \textcent unavailable in encoding T1"

Your command was ignored.

whenever a special symbol was found (for instance, the letter 'a'
circumflex). After studying encodings, unicode, ascii, latin1, and
also searching for similar errors, I found that Latex does not fully
support UTF-8 (as of this date), and that the input should be encoded
in latin1. The way to check the encoding of a file in VIM is to open
the file and type:

:set fileencoding

if it is utf-8 or anything other than 'latin1', you will get error
messages. So it really turned out that some recently edited files of
mine were in utf-8. My solution was then to type

:set fileencoding=latin1

inside GVIM, and save file, re-run latex and .... done.

PS: my latex preamble has the following:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[portuges]{babel}

I am using tetex-3.0_p1-r3