The locale support has been updated in libc 5.4.x. You can avoid many of
the individual program setups described in section
International character sets in specific applications if the programs
on your system is prepared for locale support. The Debian distribution comes
with this support if you install the wg15-locale package. Read the
Locales mini-HOWTO if you want to set up locale support on a non-Debian
system with libc 5.4.x. Systems with GNU libc 2 (libc 6.x)
also support locales.
To enable support for the Danish locale on a system with locale support you just have to set one of the following environment variables:
LANG=da_DKor
LC_ALL=da_DK
Try da_DK.ISO_8859-1 if da_DK does not work.
Both environment variables set all the individual locale catgories. You can also set a single locale category by using the name of the category as an environment variable. The locale catogories are:
Locale category Application
--------------- -----------
LC_COLLATE Collation of strings (sort order.)
LC_CTYPE Classification and conversion of characters.
LC_MESSAGES Translations of yes and no.
LC_MONETARY Format of monetary values.
LC_NUMERIC Format of non-monetary numeric values.
LC_TIME Date and time formats.
LC_ALL Sets all of the above (overrides all of them.)
LANG Sets all the categories, but can be overridden
by the individual locale categories.
A few programs such as bash and GNU emacs still need specific
setup as described in section
International character sets in specific applications, but most
should work without further attention. Programs such as nvi which
did not work with 8 bit characters before should work now.
Locale support should be more common as distributions based on the new
GNU libc 2 become available. Beware that although Red Hat Linux 5.0
comes with GNU libc 2, the locale support is not working. You have to
run this script to build the locale data files before you set the appropriate
environment variable(s) (ignore the warnings):
#!/bin/sh localedef -c -i cs_CZ -f ISO-8859-2 cs_CZ localedef -c -i da_DK -f ISO-8859-1 da_DK localedef -c -i de_AT -f ISO-8859-1 de_AT localedef -c -i de_BE -f ISO-8859-1 de_BE localedef -c -i de_CH -f ISO-8859-1 de_CH localedef -c -i de_DE -f ISO-8859-1 de_DE localedef -c -i de_LU -f ISO-8859-1 de_LU localedef -c -i en_CA -f ISO-8859-1 en_CA localedef -c -i en_DK -f ISO-8859-1 en_DK localedef -c -i en_GB -f ISO-8859-1 en_GB localedef -c -i en_IE -f ISO-8859-1 en_IE localedef -c -i en_US -f ISO-8859-1 en_US localedef -c -i es_ES -f ISO-8859-1 es_ES localedef -c -i et_EE -f ISO-8859-1 et_EE localedef -c -i eu_ES -f ISO-8859-1 eu_ES localedef -c -i fi_FI -f ISO-8859-1 fi_FI localedef -c -i fo_FO -f ISO-8859-1 fo_FO localedef -c -i fr_BE -f ISO-8859-1 fr_BE localedef -c -i fr_CA -f ISO-8859-1 fr_CA localedef -c -i fr_CH -f ISO-8859-1 fr_CH localedef -c -i fr_FR -f ISO-8859-1 fr_FR localedef -c -i fr_LU -f ISO-8859-1 fr_LU localedef -c -i ga_IE -f ISO-8859-1 ga_IE localedef -c -i gr_GR -f ISO-8859-7 gr_GR localedef -c -i hr_HR -f ISO-8859-2 hr_HR localedef -c -i hu_HU -f ISO-8859-2 hu_HU localedef -c -i is_IS -f ISO-8859-1 is_IS localedef -c -i it_IT -f ISO-8859-1 it_IT localedef -c -i iw_IL -f ISO-8859-8 iw_IL localedef -c -i kl_GL -f ISO-8859-1 kl_GL localedef -c -i lt_LT -f BALTIC lt_LT localedef -c -i lv_LV -f BALTIC lv_LV localedef -c -i nl_BE -f ISO-8859-1 nl_BE localedef -c -i nl_NL -f ISO-8859-1 nl_NL localedef -c -i no_NO -f ISO-8859-1 no_NO localedef -c -i pl_PL -f ISO-8859-2 pl_PL localedef -c -i pt_BR -f ISO-8859-1 pt_BR localedef -c -i pt_PT -f ISO-8859-1 pt_PT localedef -c -i ro_RO -f ISO-8859-2 ro_RO localedef -c -i ru_RU -f ISO-8859-5 ru_RU localedef -c -i sl_SI -f ISO-8859-2 sl_SI localedef -c -i sv_FI -f ISO-8859-1 sv_FI localedef -c -i sv_SE -f ISO-8859-1 sv_SE localedef -c -i tr_TR -f ISO-8859-9 tr_TR
As of glibc-2.0.7-4.i386.rpm the locale data files are included with the
libraries and this script is no longer necessary.