Difference between revisions of "Locale"

Revision as of 02:42, 8 March 2014

Locales are used in Linux to define which language the user uses. As the locales define the character sets being used as well, setting up the correct locale is especially important if the language contains non-ASCII characters.

Locale names are defined using the following format:

<lang>_<territory>.<codeset>[@<modifiers>]

Enabling necessary locales

Before a locale can be used on the system, it has to be enabled first. To list all available locales, use:

$ locale -a

To enable a locale, uncomment the name of the locale in the file /etc/locale.gen. This file contains all the available locales that can be used on the system. Revert the process to disable a locale. After the necessary locales are enabled, the system needs to be updated with the new locales:

# locale-gen

To display the locales now currently in use, use:

$ locale

US English example

First uncomment the following locales in /etc/locale.gen:

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

Then update the system as root:

# locale-gen

Setting the locale system-wide

To define the system-wide locale used on the system, set LANG in /etc/locale.conf.

locale.conf contains a new-line separated list of environment variable assignments: besides LANG, it supports all the LC_* variables, with the exception of LC_ALL.

/etc/locale.conf

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

An advanced example configuration would be:

/etc/locale.conf

# Enable UTF-8 with Australian settings.
LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"

# Keep the default sort order (e.g. files starting with a '.'
# should appear at the start of a directory listing.)
LC_COLLATE="C"

# Set the short date to YYYY-MM-DD (test with "date +%c")
LC_TIME="en_DK.UTF-8"

You can set the default locale in locale.conf also using localectl, for example:

# localectl set-locale LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"

See man 1 localectl and man 5 locale.conf for details.

They will take effect after rebooting the system and will be set for individual sessions at login.

Setting fallback locales

Programs which use gettext for translations respect the LANGUAGE option in addition to the usual variables. This allows users to specify a list of locales that will be used in that order. If a translation for the preferred locale is unavailable, another from a similar locale will be used instead of the default. For example, an Australian user might want to fall back to British rather than US spelling:

~/.bashrc

export LANGUAGE="en_AU:en_GB:en"

or system-wide

/etc/locale.conf

LANG="en_AU"
LANGUAGE="en_AU:en_GB:en"

Setting per user locale

As we mentioned earlier, some users might want to define a different locale than the system-wide locale.

The script etc/profile.d/locale.sh overrides the system-wide locale with the one found in $HOME/.config/locale.conf. This file does not exist by default.

$HOME/.config/locale.conf

LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="de_DE.UTF-8"

Setting collation

Collation, or sorting, is a little different. Sorting is a goofy beast and different locales do things differently. To get around potential issues, Arch used to set LC_COLLATE="C" in /etc/profile. However, this method is now deprecated. To enable this behavior, simply add the following to /etc/locale.conf:

LC_COLLATE="C"

Now the ls command will sort dotfiles first, followed by uppercase and lowercase filenames. Note that without a LC_COLLATE setting, locale aware apps sort by LC_ALL or LANG, but LC_COLLATE settings will be overridden if LC_ALL is set. If this is a problem, ensure that LC_ALL is not set by adding the following to /etc/profile instead:

export LC_ALL=

Note that LC_ALL is the only LC variable which cannot be set in /etc/locale.conf.

Setting the first day of the week

In many countries the first day of the week is Monday. To adjust this, change or add the following lines in the LC_TIME section in /usr/share/i18n/locales/<your_locale>:

week            7;19971130;5
first_weekday   2
first_workday   2

And then update the system:

# locale-gen

Troubleshooting

My terminal doesn't support UTF-8

Unfortunately some terminals do not support UTF-8. In this case, you have to use a different terminal. Here are some terminals that have support for UTF-8:

• vte-based terminals
• gnustep-terminal
• konsole
• mlterm
• rxvt-unicode
• xterm

Xterm doesn't support UTF-8

xterm only supports UTF-8 if you run it as uxterm or xterm -u8.

Gnome-terminal or rxvt-unicode doesn't support UTF-8

You need to launch these applications from a UTF-8 locale or they will drop UTF-8 support. Enable the en_US.UTF-8 locale (or your local UTF-8 alternative) per the instructions above and set it as the default locale, then reboot.

See also

• Gentoo Linux Localization Guide
• Gentoo Wiki Archives: Locales
• ICU's interactive collation testing
• Free Standards Group Open Internationalisation Initiative
• The Single UNIX Specification definition of Locale by The Open Group
• Locale environment variables