Location and language(s)

[Lee Braiden]

On Thursday 21 July 2005 16:09, Bjørn Ingmar Berg wrote:
> My point is that time-zone, OS language and dictionary language is and
> should not be interdependant.  It would be great to be able to set up
> the system, chosing these three individually.  And when it comes to
> language it would be great to be able to change or add to these as I
> go along.  I suspect that some if this, possibly all of it, is
> possible right away.  I see there are "locales" and "language packs"
> that can be added.  I also remember a tip on this list enabling two
> different users to have different languages.

Correct.  Choosing your timezone is does just that, I think.  Probably, 
choosing your keyboard layout is what sets your language etc.  Or perhaps a 
combination of the two.

You can change the settings via environment variables—either globally, or just 
for a single application that you want to run in another language or with 
another locale.

LC_LANG sets your language
LC_CTYPE sets your character encoding
LC_LOCALE sets your... well, locale :)

I'm not too sure on the specific values available for them :(

Running dpkg-reconfigure locale will setup the basics for you.

> What I hope to end up with is a setup where I can change time-zone
> without that affecting anything else; where I can toggle Ubuntu itself
> between english and norwegian; and where I have dictionaries and spell
> checkers for english, norwegian and german available.

There's no easy way (that I know of) to switch the entire system's 
internationalisation setup short of power-cycling (or at least editing a file 
and runlevel-cycling).  But certainly, you can have different logins that are 
in english and norwegian, or just different applications launched in 
different languages by wrapping them with scripts.  You can also set 
different keyboard layouts easily with GNOME or KDE etc.

Hope that helps some.

-- 
Lee Braiden
http://www.DigitalUnleashed.com
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