Re: I ran an experiment with RedHat ... and ...

[Simos Xenitellis <simos pc96 ma rhbnc ac uk>]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Dinesh Nadarajah wrote:

> So I've been having a hard time getting the locales to get registered on the
> systems. I decided to conduct a little experiment. Here is what I did:
>
> o I took 2 identical systems (Compaq desk pros)
> o On one I installed RH7.0 and the other RH7.1.
> o I installed everything but Gnome.
> o Once the installation was complete, I logged into KDE.
> o Using Lynx I installed Ximian GNOME on both distributions.
> o Along with Ximian, the locales got installed also.
> o I set .xinitrc to gnome-session.
> o I set LANG, LANGUAGE, and LC_ALL in .bashrc
> o I rebooted the system.
>
> What did I see ....
>
> o RH7.0 booted with the translation messages.
> o RH7.1 did not.
> o On both systems, when I ran "locale" on the terminal I got the correct
> locale for everything except LANG which kept getting reset to en_US.
>
> Conclusion ...
>
> o I don't know what is going.
> o May be wrong .mo files for the translation, but then Ximian should not
> have downloaded them for RH7.1
>
> Request ...
>
> Anyone else can suggest an explanation?

Can you verify that the LANG/LANGUAGE variables have the correct values?
>From an xterm/gnome-terminal, can you type "locale" to verify?

In order to understand if an application is reading the correct .mo
file, you can use the "strace" command ("strace" package).
In a gnome-terminal, try

	strace -o output.txt gnome-about

After you exit from gnome-about, run

	grep open output.txt

in order to find what files are opened by the application.

On my system it is:

===>
...
open("/usr/share/locale/el_GR/LC_MESSAGES/gnome-core.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1
ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/el/LC_MESSAGES/gnome-core.mo", O_RDONLY) = 6
open("/usr/share/locale/el_GR/LC_MESSAGES/gnome-libs.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1
ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/share/locale/el/LC_MESSAGES/gnome-libs.mo", O_RDONLY) = 6
...
===<

The second and forth lines show that the correct .mo files where found.
(The open() function returns succesfully).

In most recent Linux distributions, you set the locale in
/etc/sysconfig/i18n so that it is enabled machine-wide.

simos