how do you set the locale in FC4?

[Richard Bradbury]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 15:33:32 +1030 Tim wrote:

> Tim:
> >>> Previously I've set one of my FC4 boxes to the correct locale for me
> >>> (en_AU, not the default en_US), but I cannot remember how I did that,
> >>> nor find a way to do it now.  What's the trick?
>
> Paul Howarth:
> >> Edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n ?
>
> Tim:
> > Too easy, and it works too!  ;-)  But I don't remember whether I did it
> > that way before, it doesn't jog the memory.  And try as I might, during
> > the last two installations, I couldn't find a way to install additional
> > languages like prior versions did.
> >
> > I spent ages apropos-ing locale and language.  There's a man file for
> > setlocale that leads you up the garden path (there's no setlocale
> > command).
>
> Seems I spoke too soon.  It looks like /etc/sysconfig/i18n is only part
> of the equation.  On one of my PCs it contains this:
>
> LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
> SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
> SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
>
> Yet, if I type "locale" into a CLI, as myself, I get the following back:
>
> LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
> ...
>
> But as root, or other users, I get en_US answers, thus:
>
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> ...
>
> So there must be somewhere else that sets the locale, but I don't know
> where for sure - I can see a ~/.dmrc file with a locale in it, but I
> don't know if that's the be-all and end-all for individual user
> settings.  It appears that /etc/sysconfig/i18n just sets the default.
>
>

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 08:23:14 -0500 Claude Jones wrote:

> Don't know if this is what you're looking for, but have you played with this?
> /usr/bin/system-config-language
> This presupposes you have more than one language already installed, however.
>
>
I too had a problem with the default locale being set to en_US-UTF-8 despite
selecting a UK keyboard and London timezone at install time.  From memory,
the Anaconda graphical installer listed "English" as the only English
variant rather than "English (U.S.)", "English (British)" etc.

After a bit of rummaging around I found that the default FC4 installation
also fails to correctly list the full set of available locales in
/etc/sysconfig/i18n.  Running "/usr/bin/locale --all-locales" gives me a
massive list, but the configuration file lists only three on the line
beginning "SUPPORTED=...", as shown in Tim's example above.  Consequently,
the "system-config-language" tool recommended by Claude Jones lists "English
(USA)" as the only available option.  That's what I call Hobson's Choice ;-)

Only once I had manually appended "...:en_GB.UTF-8" to this line of the
configuration file would the "sytem-config-language" tool allow me to set my
preferred locale.  This, as you might expect, simply sets the value of
"LANG=..." in the configuration file and results in a change to the default
locale for subsequent logins.  (This system default may still be overridden
by dotfiles in your home directory, of course.)

I wonder if this problem with /etc/sysconfig/i18n is a shortcoming of the
FC4 installation procedure?

--
Richard.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20060308/17885468/attachment-0001.htm>