language choice in RH 9

[Peter Lucas]

I am trying to understand how language choice in RH 9 works,
in particular in relationship to the locale database. The
reason is that some of my settings are messed up and I have
no idea why.

For example:

/etc/sysconfig/i18n

contains

LANG="en_US"
SUPPORTED="en_US:en"
SYSFONT="lat0-sun16"
SYSFONTACM="iso01"

now if I startup acroread I get an error message

UTF-8 not supported, and next it crashes. If I remove i18n
and use redhat-config-language then the i18n after choosing
American English (and this is the only choice strange enough
despite the fact that locale contains all sorts of languages)
becomes:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en"
the rest is the same as above.

So that is why I thought there is something wrong with
language choice. GDM seems to have something to do with
it. The question now is:

where, in addition to /etc/sysconfig/i18n

is there information stored about the chosen language?

Thanks for your help.

Peter

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Peter Lucas wrote:

> I am trying to understand how language choice in RH 9 works,
> in particular in relationship to the locale database. The
> reason is that some of my settings are messed up and I have
> no idea why.
>
> For example:
>
> /etc/sysconfig/i18n
>
> contains
>
> LANG="en_US"
> SUPPORTED="en_US:en"
> SYSFONT="lat0-sun16"
> SYSFONTACM="iso01"
>
> now if I startup acroread I get an error message
>
> UTF-8 not supported, and next it crashes. If I remove i18n
> and use redhat-config-language then the i18n after choosing
> American English (and this is the only choice strange enough
> despite the fact that locale contains all sorts of languages)
> becomes:
>
> LANG="en_US.UTF-8
> SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en"
> the rest is the same as above.
>
> So that is why I thought there is something wrong with
> language choice. GDM seems to have something to do with
> it. The question now is:
>
> where, in addition to /etc/sysconfig/i18n
>
> is there information stored about the chosen language?
>
> Thanks for your help.

It's scattered in the kernel, in /usr/share/ in a bunch of places, in
the packages of various software, etc.

There is a *LOT* of old core utilities that break with the various
internationalizion standards: "nroff" (which is at the core of the "man"
command) and "sort" are two of the most critical ones messed up by this
approach to add options for every environment and possible environment
under the sun, rather than using a basic standard. And don't get me
going on combining Samba with Asian versions of Windows: b-r-r-r-r-r-r.

In general, whenever writing shell scripts and other tools these days, I
same myself a whole lot of pain by making "LANG=POSIX" one of the first
bits of environment configuration: it helps a lot. Since I believe that
acroread has a binary shell script that actually calls the executable
over in /opt, you could edit that shell script and add that setting.