Table of Contents
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Locale
Useful links
- locale man page 7 with explanation of LC_ variables
Commands
Command | Function |
---|---|
locale -a | Show the currently activated languages |
locale | Show the locale settings |
dpkg-reconfigure locales | As root Select the languages you need |
update-locale | |
locale-gen | As root Generate the locale files from the template |
localectl status | Show the locale settings |
POSIX locale is equal to C locale is a default locale
File locations
Check if your system uses systemd with whereis systemd
File | Remark |
---|---|
systemd systems: /etc/default/locale | |
non systemd systems: /etc/locale.conf | If the file does not exist create it. After saving the file you are done. You can check the result with localectl status. systemd seems to ignore LC_CTYPE, LC_COLLATE, LC_MESSAGES and LC_ALL |
/etc/locale.nopurge |
We noticed that systemd might also use /etc/default/locale. To be save put the data in both files. To be investigated
After updating reboot your computer. We have not found a way yet to do the system wide update without rebooting. update-locale does not do it. If you know a way please let us know. Thanks
Example of the locale.conf file
Path: /etc/locale.conf
An example file, contents see below, can be downloaded here
- locale.conf
# File generated by update-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US:en" # To be added by the system administrator: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_US:en LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_TIME="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_NAME="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="nl_NL.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="nl_NL.UTF-8" #LC_ALL=
If you put one or more, changed, lines in .bashrc those settings will only apply to terminals, not to the GUI
Configuration
- Log in as root
- Check the installed locales with
- Pre systemd: locales -a
- systemd: localectl status
- Check the environment variables with locale
- Run update-locale check if it generates no errors when ran
- If there are errors copy the extracted locale.conf.gz file to /etc and adapt it to your needs
- Log out and log in again. If you know a way to install /etc/default/locale (pre systemd: locale.conf) without logging out please let us know. We clould not find it so far. The method described on the Arch Linux pages did not work for us. Thanks.
Solving errors
Grub issues
The locale as set in grub can have influcence. To be investigated.
Libre Office Calc
Calc needs a period where a comma should work in a number =56,78+1 To be solved
UTF-8 and the terminal
When UTF-8 does not work well in a terminal you can replace it with ISO-8859-1 Run
dpkg-reconfigure locales
and select the language of choice. Unselect the UTF-8 variant
Replace UTF-8 with ISO-8859-1 in
/etc/default/locale
Reboot the system
Run
locale-gen update-locale
The later should give no output, just a new prompt. Then all is well.
Test it with the application which did not display well
Special characters
Localepurge
Saves diskspace by deleting locales in languages not needed and man pages in languages not needed
Inital setup is done with dpkg-reconfigure localepurge
- Use dpkg --path-exclude? choose No (The default)
- If Yes is chosen --path-exclude is set to on and localepurge will configure dpkg to exclude the desired locales at unpack time
- Using --path-exclude can be risky and break your system. See the dpkg man page on --path-exclude and the localepurge man page
- Based on the same locale information you choose, localepurge can also delete localized man pages.
- Also delete localized man pages?
- Choose Yes (The default)
- Next time, when you run aptitude to remove or install the locales will be purged. In our case it freed about 470MB of hard disk space
Then check the settings in
/etc/locale.nopurge
and make changes as needed. Proposal
#USE_DPKG MANDELETE #DONTBOTHERNEWLOCALE SHOWFREEDSPACE #QUICKNDIRTYCALC #VERBOSE en en_US.UTF-8 nl nl_NL.UTF-8
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