Fedora Users — Re: how do you set the locale in FC4?

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.