Easily switching languages in Linux

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005 15:12:50 -0400, G Dahler staggered into the Black Sun and said:

If the environment variable LANG is set to C (or enUS, or enGB, or enBLAH...) then all the programs with l10n-i18n support (most of them) will use English for all their messages. If LANG is set to fr, then all the messages will be in French; if LANG is zhTW, all the messages will be in Chinese (Taiwan variation), etcetera. That's if the locale data for the languages you need is installed inusr-share-localeand so forth.

IME, you get the best results in X from setting LANG before X starts. One way to do this is withetc-profile , like so:

if `-usr-bin-whoami` = 'root' ; then LANG=enUS # root uses American else LANG=whatever # other users use whatever fi # more profile stuff; at the end export LANG

...in KDE, at least, you can switch the locale settings with one of the Kpanel applets. I haven't explored this much since American and bastardized English in the form of C-Java-Perl are the main languages I need to use. If the people doing i18n didn't know how to translate some messages into $LANG, it's possible that those messages will show up in English, or will show up in "all your base are belong to us"-style $LANG.

Hm. I thought most of the tech terms-buzzwords got phonetically transcribed. Oh well, HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong