ISO 8859-1 on Ubuntu 6.0.6

[Gary W. Swearingen]

jvpgomes <ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org> writes:

> But I have one problem.
>
> It seems that GNOME uses only UTF-8. Every time I start a program using
> the GNOME menu, that program will have the UTF-8 codification by
> default. 

Yeah, UTF-8 is sort of supposed to be the new standard character set
for perty much everything on unixy systems these days.  And every
character in ISO-8859-1 .. -16 is also in UTF-8, so that _should_
be a good thing for most purposes.

> I don't understand why GNOME still uses UTF-8 even if the locales are
> set to ISO-8859-1.

And if the locale was so set before you started GNOME.

As another test, write a script with nothing but
"locale >/tmp/locale.$$.locale" in it and make a GNOME menu item for
it.  Run the script from the menu and see what's in the tmp file.  If
it has UTF stuff in it, GNOME is either not seeing your changed locale
(due to timing issues between GNOME start and locale setting) or it
is just ignoring it (maybe it's written to only use UTF-8).

> It's a shame because Ubuntu is my favourite distro, but since I upgrade
> to Dapper, I've been experiencing some problems... locales, printer, and
> some other small questions... now this is the only problem that I could
> solved yet...

I'll guess that you shouldn't be trying to set the OS (and GNOME)
locale to 8859, but trying to configure a UTF-8 locale that does what
you want, usually.  There should be a German one.  If a particular app
needs a 8889 locale for some strange reason, make the app a wrapper
script to change the locale for that script's process and
sub-processes (eg, the app) only.