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- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
- <!DOCTYPE sect1 PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
- "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd" [
- <!ENTITY % general-entities SYSTEM "../general.ent">
- %general-entities;
- ]>
- <sect1 id="ch-config-locale" revision="systemd">
- <?dbhtml filename="locale.html"?>
- <title>Configuring the System Locale</title>
- <indexterm zone="ch-config-locale">
- <primary sortas="e-etc-locale-conf">/etc/locale.conf</primary>
- </indexterm>
- <para>The <filename>/etc/locale.conf</filename> file below sets some
- environment variables necessary for native language support. Setting
- them properly results in:</para>
- <itemizedlist>
- <listitem>
- <para>The output of programs being translated into your native language</para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- <para>The correct classification of characters into letters, digits and other
- classes. This is necessary for <command>bash</command> to properly accept
- non-ASCII characters in command lines in non-English locales</para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- <para>The correct alphabetical sorting order for the country</para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- <para>The appropriate default paper size</para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- <para>The correct formatting of monetary, time, and date values</para>
- </listitem>
- </itemizedlist>
- <para>Replace <replaceable><ll></replaceable> below with the two-letter code
- for your desired language (e.g., <quote>en</quote>) and
- <replaceable><CC></replaceable> with the two-letter code for the appropriate
- country (e.g., <quote>GB</quote>). <replaceable><charmap></replaceable> should
- be replaced with the canonical charmap for your chosen locale. Optional
- modifiers such as <quote>@euro</quote> may also be present.</para>
- <para>The list of all locales supported by Glibc can be obtained by running
- the following command:</para>
- <screen role="nodump"><userinput>locale -a</userinput></screen>
- <para>Charmaps can have a number of aliases, e.g., <quote>ISO-8859-1</quote>
- is also referred to as <quote>iso8859-1</quote> and <quote>iso88591</quote>.
- Some applications cannot handle the various synonyms correctly (e.g., require
- that <quote>UTF-8</quote> is written as <quote>UTF-8</quote>, not
- <quote>utf8</quote>), so it is the safest in most
- cases to choose the canonical name for a particular locale. To determine
- the canonical name, run the following command, where <replaceable><locale
- name></replaceable> is the output given by <command>locale -a</command> for
- your preferred locale (<quote>en_GB.iso88591</quote> in our example).</para>
- <screen role="nodump"><userinput>LC_ALL=<replaceable><locale name></replaceable> locale charmap</userinput></screen>
- <para>For the <quote>en_GB.iso88591</quote> locale, the above command
- will print:</para>
- <screen><computeroutput>ISO-8859-1</computeroutput></screen>
- <para>This results in a final locale setting of <quote>en_GB.ISO-8859-1</quote>.
- It is important that the locale found using the heuristic above is tested prior
- to it being added to the Bash startup files:</para>
- <screen role="nodump"><userinput>LC_ALL=<locale name> locale language
- LC_ALL=<locale name> locale charmap
- LC_ALL=<locale name> locale int_curr_symbol
- LC_ALL=<locale name> locale int_prefix</userinput></screen>
- <para>The above commands should print the language name, the character
- encoding used by the locale, the local currency, and the prefix to dial
- before the telephone number in order to get into the country. If any of the
- commands above fail with a message similar to the one shown below, this means
- that your locale was either not installed in Chapter 6 or is not
- supported by the default installation of Glibc.</para>
- <screen><computeroutput>locale: Cannot set LC_* to default locale: No such file or directory</computeroutput></screen>
- <para>If this happens, you should either install the desired locale using the
- <command>localedef</command> command, or consider choosing a different locale.
- Further instructions assume that there are no such error messages from
- Glibc.</para>
- <!-- FIXME: the xlib example will become obsolete in the future.-->
- <para>Some packages beyond LFS may also lack support for your chosen locale. One
- example is the X library (part of the X Window System), which outputs the
- following error message if the locale does not exactly match one of the character
- map names in its internal files:</para>
- <screen><computeroutput>Warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C</computeroutput></screen>
- <para>In several cases Xlib expects that the character map will be listed in
- uppercase notation with canonical dashes. For instance, "ISO-8859-1" rather
- than "iso88591". It is also possible to find an appropriate specification by
- removing the charmap part of the locale specification. This can be checked
- by running the <command>locale charmap</command> command in both locales.
- For example, one would have to change "de_DE.ISO-8859-15@euro" to
- "de_DE@euro" in order to get this locale recognized by Xlib.</para>
- <para>Other packages can also function incorrectly (but may not necessarily
- display any error messages) if the locale name does not meet their expectations.
- In those cases, investigating how other Linux distributions support your locale
- might provide some useful information.</para>
- <para>Once the proper locale settings have been determined, create the
- <filename>/etc/locale.conf</filename> file:</para>
- <screen><userinput>cat > /etc/locale.conf << "EOF"
- <literal>LANG=<replaceable><ll>_<CC>.<charmap><@modifiers></replaceable></literal>
- EOF</userinput></screen>
- <para>Note that you can modify <filename>/etc/locale.conf</filename> with the
- systemd <command>localectl</command> utility. To use
- <command>localectl</command> for the example above, run:</para>
- <screen role="nodump"><userinput>localectl set-locale LANG="<replaceable><ll>_<CC>.<charmap><@modifiers></replaceable>"</userinput></screen>
- <para>You can also specify other language specific environment variables such
- as <envar>LANG</envar>, <envar>LC_CTYPE</envar>, <envar>LC_NUMERIC</envar> or
- any other environment variable from <command>locale</command> output. Just
- separate them with a space. An example where <envar>LANG</envar> is set as
- en_US.UTF-8 but <envar>LC_CTYPE</envar> is set as just en_US is:</para>
- <screen role="nodump"><userinput>localectl set-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LC_CTYPE="en_US"</userinput></screen>
- <note><para>Please note that the <command>localectl</command> command can
- be used only on a system booted with systemd.</para></note>
- <para>The <quote>C</quote> (default) and <quote>en_US</quote> (the recommended
- one for United States English users) locales are different. <quote>C</quote>
- uses the US-ASCII 7-bit character set, and treats bytes with the high bit set
- as invalid characters. That's why, e.g., the <command>ls</command> command
- substitutes them with question marks in that locale. Also, an attempt to send
- mail with such characters from Mutt or Pine results in non-RFC-conforming
- messages being sent (the charset in the outgoing mail is indicated as <quote>unknown
- 8-bit</quote>). It's suggested that you use the <quote>C</quote> locale only
- if you are certain that you will never need 8-bit characters.</para>
- <!--
- <para>UTF-8 based locales are not supported well by many programs.
- Work is in progress to document and, if possible, fix such problems, see
- <ulink url="&blfs-book;introduction/locale-issues.html"/>.</para>
- -->
- </sect1>
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