Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 262 — #288

10.7.1 Some Examples

You should always set the language and country codes together. Lan-

guage settings follow the standard ISO 639 (http://www.evertype.

com/standards/iso639/iso639-en.html and http://www.loc.

gov/standards/iso639-2/). Country codes are listed in ISO 3166, see

(http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1/

en_listp1.html). It only makes sense to set values for which usable de-

scription ﬁles can be found in /usr/lib/locale. Additional description

ﬁles can be created from the ﬁles in /usr/share/i18n using the com-

mand localedef. A description ﬁle for en_US.UTF-8 (for English and

United States) can be created with:

localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

LANG=en_US.UTF-8 This is the default setting if English is selected dur-

ing installation. If you selected another language, that language is

enabled but still with UTF-8 as the character encoding.

LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 This sets the variable to English language,

country to United States, and the character set to ISO-8859-1.

This character set does not support the Euro sign, but it will be use-

ful sometimes for programs that have not been updated to support

UTF-8. The string deﬁning the charset (ISO-8859-1 in this case) is

then evaluated by programs like Emacs.

SuSEconﬁg reads the variables in /etc/sysconfig/language and

writes the necessary changes to /etc/SuSEconfig/profile and

/etc/SuSEconfig/csh.cshrc. /etc/SuSEconfig/profile is read

or sourced by /etc/profile. /etc/SuSEconfig/csh.cshrc is sourced

by /etc/csh.cshrc. This makes the settings available system-wide.

Users can override the system defaults by editing their ~/.bashrc accord-

ingly. For instance, if you do not want to use the system-wide en_US for

program messages, include LC_MESSAGES=es_ES so messages are dis-

played in Spanish instead.

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10.7. Local Adjustments — I18N and L10N