Re: Locale: why does Gnumeric think I'm an American?!

[Nicholas Lamb <njl ecs soton ac uk>]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 10:47:03PM +0100, Chris Seaton wrote:
> What do I have to do to change this?

It depends...

> I'm using Gnumeric 1.4.3 on Linux 2.6, Fedora 4.
>
> I'm pretty sure when I installed I told Fedora I was in the UK (several 
> times, actually, time zone, keyboard, language...). There doesn't seem 
> to be any applet in Fedora or Gnome to change my locale settings, so 
> what do I do? Where does Gnumeric take the hint from? Please don't tell 
> me it's hardcoded to be American.

It's more than possible that you've managed to /install/ the UK locale
but without actually choosing it as your default.

Check the output of 'locale' as already mentioned in this thread, and
if it's wrong (should be 'en_GB.UTF-8') you can fix it system wide from
Desktop -> System Settings -> Language
simply choose English (Great Britain). If it's not listed then, despite
your best intentions, you didn't install UK locale support.

You can also edit the file /etc/sysconfig/i18n if you don't like or
trust Red Hat's config tools.

OTOH if locale reports en_GB.UTF-8 but your new spreadsheets all come
out with US$ and other oddities then you may have found a bug, which
you should report to the GNOME Bugzilla iirc.

> Do I need to set some environment variables or something? How come 
> Fedora didn't do that?

It worked fine for me, and for many other people. So either you made
a mistake or you've found a somewhat obscure bug.

> What will happen to my existing Gnumeric files? 
> Will they change to meet my new locale?

That's an interesting question, iirc format details (like £ signs) are
preserved, but this is a tricky area in general. We want to preserve
meaning, yet we also want to be locale sensitive.

Nick.