The locale support has been updated in libc 5.4.x. You can avoid many of
the individual programs 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_DK
LC_ALL=da_DK
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 make it work (ignore the warnings):
#!/bin/sh
localedef -c -i en_DK -f ISO-8859-1 en_DK
localedef -c -i sv_SE -f ISO-8859-1 sv_SE
localedef -c -i fi_FI -f ISO-8859-1 fi_FI
localedef -c -i sv_FI -f ISO-8859-1 sv_FI
localedef -c -i ro_RO -f ISO-8859-1 ro_RO
localedef -c -i pt_PT -f ISO-8859-1 pt_PT
localedef -c -i no_NO -f ISO-8859-1 no_NO
localedef -c -i nl_NL -f ISO-8859-1 nl_NL
localedef -c -i fr_BE -f ISO-8859-1 fr_BE
localedef -c -i nl_BE -f ISO-8859-1 nl_BE
localedef -c -i da_DK -f ISO-8859-1 da_DK
localedef -c -i kl_GL -f ISO-8859-1 kl_GL
localedef -c -i it_IT -f ISO-8859-1 it_IT
localedef -c -i is_IS -f ISO-8859-1 is_IS
localedef -c -i fr_LU -f ISO-8859-1 fr_LU
localedef -c -i fr_FR -f ISO-8859-1 fr_FR
localedef -c -i de_DE -f ISO-8859-1 de_DE
localedef -c -i de_CH -f ISO-8859-1 de_CH
localedef -c -i fr_CH -f ISO-8859-1 fr_CH
localedef -c -i en_CA -f ISO-8859-1 en_CA
localedef -c -i fr_CA -f ISO-8859-1 fr_CA
localedef -c -i fo_FO -f ISO-8859-1 fo_FO
localedef -c -i et_EE -f ISO-8859-1 et_EE
localedef -c -i es_ES -f ISO-8859-1 es_ES
localedef -c -i en_US -f ISO-8859-1 en_US
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 de_LU -f ISO-8859-1 de_LU
localedef -c -i de_BE -f ISO-8859-1 de_BE
localedef -c -i de_AT -f ISO-8859-1 de_AT
localedef -c -i sl_SI -f ISO-8859-2 sl_SI
localedef -c -i ru_RU -f ISO-8859-5 ru_RU
localedef -c -i pl_PL -f ISO-8859-2 pl_PL
localedef -c -i lv_LV -f BALTIC lv_LV
localedef -c -i lt_LT -f BALTIC lt_LT
localedef -c -i iw_IL -f ISO-8859-8 iw_IL
localedef -c -i hu_HU -f ISO-8859-2 hu_HU
localedef -c -i hr_HR -f ISO-8859-4 hr_HR
localedef -c -i gr_GR -f ISO-8859-7 gr_GR