Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Internationalization

Normally I use to handle files in Spanish, English a few in Dutch and nowadays others in German. The traditional en_US locale have worked nicely since I started with Slackware. Additional to the classic issue of the decimal separation symbol ('.' instead of ','), which can be  solved easily in KDE,  I have had some problems with the file names from an external disk formatted in NTFS wish I use to use in Windows as well. Probably the problem will nor be solved changing the codeset in the Linux system (perhaps configuring better the mounting parameters of the disk) but at least I would like to try and at the same time give more consistency to the system.

Localization

Mora than changing the language I'm interested in set Slackware to UTF-8 codeset.
To modify globally the locale variables it is needed to edit the file /etc/profile.d/lang.sh and change the values of the variables set there. I will use:

export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

This codeset already considers LC_COLLATE=C. Although it is should not be necessary set it, by default it set in the script and I did not comment it.

To configure the locale for only a user, the same sentence have to be added to the file ~/.profile

During the installation process is also possible to set the console to use unicode, there is an option during the lilo configuration that allows this. This is not the case when you use elilo.

The only problem with using en_GB is, of course, the currency. So I also set the variable LC_MONETARY with an euro locale:

export LC_MONETARY=nl_NL.UTF-8

I'm not sure about the metrics.

In KDE it is abailable the translation to British English and other common languages without installing any KDEi package (I did not install anyone).


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Source: http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:localization

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