[SWLUG] Getting a welsh system working.

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 01/05/2004 am 12:37, ysgrifennodd Telsa Gwynne:
> If the UTF-8 locale doesn't exist yet, you will need to stick 
> the glibc-i18n RPM on the machine (don't think it's there by 
> default) and then run as root, 
>   localedef -f UTF-8 -i cy_GB cy_GB.UTF-8
> 
> According to my notes, this should create the locale. This is
> the one really important bit, and it's the bit I don't 
> understand. If it doesn't work, I have no idea what to do next.
> Which might be a problem. 
> 
> Oh yes. The glibc-i18n rpm is a SuSE-ism. Most other distros don't
> split localedef out into a package by that name. (On Fedora
> it is in glibc-common.) 

On Debian, the "localedef" program is included with libc6, but all the
locale definitions are included in the "locale" package. The preferred
method of choosing which locales you want to use on your system is by
configuring the locales package, which will do all the localedef stuff
for you. You can do this by running "dpkg-reconfigure locales".

> If there is no /etc/sysconfig/i18n, then ~/.i18n probably
> won't work. So on to the last fallback: stick it into your
> .bash_profile. I used to do this until I discovered .i18n.
> I still have it there, just commented out: 

I have no idea which distributions .i18n works on apart from
RedHat/Fedora. I suspect it was invented by RedHat, but I don't whether
anybody else adopted it.

> (LC_ALL covers all the locale stuff, including -- I think --
> LANG. LC_COLLATE is sort order. I like having the old 
> ABC...XYZabc...xyz order so I wanted to keep it. AaBbCc
> confuses me. You won't need to set LC_COLLATE unless you
> like the old sort order too.) 

The locale(7) manual page describes how this works. Basically, for each
aspect of the locale (collation, numbers, time, messages), the following
check is done:

 - if the LC_ALL environment variable is defined, its value is used
 - otherwise, if a specific LC_ variable (e.g. LC_COLLATE for collation)
   is defined, its value is used
 - otherwise, if LANG is defined, it is used
 - otherwise, the default ("C") is used

For example, if you wanted to use Welsh for everything except for
collation (just another word for "sort" in this context, as far as I can
tell), you could do

  export LC_COLLATE=C
  export LANG=cy_GB.UTF-8

> I think both gdm and kdm give you choices of which language
> to run a session in if you use a graphical login. 

GDM definitely does.

> Mozilla wants you to install language packs: you go to
> the appropriate part of the preferences and "download more
> languages" or whatever it is. But those packs are for
> specific releases of Mozilla. I don't know whether a
> 1.2 language pack will apply to a 1.4 Mozilla at all.

Sadly, Mozilla Language packs are version-specific.

> Um. Good luck. If any of the above works or doesn't, I
> would be very interested to know, btw :) 

Yes, I'd very much like to hear about your experiences getting it
working too. Especially about which packages you had to install and
which commands you had to run in order to get the locale working. I'd
also be interested to hear which version of GNOME they have.

-- 
Dafydd