Re: How to change locale

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

> Kaixo!
> 
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 02:11:25PM +0100, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> 
> > >     how can I change 'on the fly' my locale? it's italian now, but I would
> > 
> > setenv LANG en
> 
> That is not enough, $LANG is the less powerfull of all (that is, it may be
> overriden by almost all other locale related variables! Defining LANG may
> very well have no effect at all).
> 
> I sugest defining LC_ALL instead.
> 
> > or in bash
> > LANGUAGE=en
> > export LANGUAGE
> 
> And also LANGUAGE.
> 
> LC_ALL (LC_CTYPE in fact) is needed to correctly set the fontset;
> LANGUAGE is the one selecting the language to display in translations,
> but LANGUAGE=ru won't work if your locale cannot display cyrillic;
> to be sure you need to define both LANGUAGE and LC_CTYPE (or LC_ALL which
> overrides all LC_* variables).
> 
> When I want to test I do:  LC_ALL=ru LANGUAGE=ru gnomine

Thanks for the information, although I'm still pretty confused about these
issues.  I currently use:
  LANG=ru LC_ALL=ru GDM_LANG=ru gnomine

I don't know where GDM_LANG comes into the picture - My guess is that some
GNOME apps use this in place of LANG so that they detect the language
selected by the user when they log in through GDM.  Can anybody explain
this?

Also, I don't understand the difference between LANG and LANGUAGE.  If I
type 'locale' then LANG and all the LC_* variables show up but not
LANGUAGE.

And then there is the issue of LINGUAS which I believe you set at build
time to determine which languages the packages are localized for, or
something remotely like this.

Does anybody know of a document or web page which explains all this, or
feel like explaining all of this?

Dan