09:40 pm, 25 Jul 06
ubuntu broken locales (cadt strikes again)
A while back I received a Chinese translation for LogJam. Tonight I got around to testing it, but discovered that the normal way to configure my locales had stopped working. CADT strikes again!*
Some background: To run a program in a different language, you need to have configured locales, which (to my not-really-understanding understanding) is a bunch of data files off in
But on my system now, there is no
After some poking and prodding -- everything you'll find on Google describes the same procedure I gave two paragraphs up -- I finally discovered Ubuntu bug #48573, where someone basically says "Um, this used to work and it broke." And the response is, "That is intentional. We now have a Totally New Way to configure this and it's nicely controllable via System→Administration→Language Support."
Unfortunately I don't have a System→Administration→Language Support, nor do I know where to get one. Hrmph.
* I'm not really too upset about this, as I can recognize there may have been good reasons to make the change. On the other hand, I am upset that it was broken in such a way that I can't track down the fix.
Some background: To run a program in a different language, you need to have configured locales, which (to my not-really-understanding understanding) is a bunch of data files off in
/usr/share somewhere. Typically, you edit /etc/locale.gen and then run locale-gen; or, if you wanna be fancy, it's dpkg-reconfigure locales and it'll give you a list of languages to check off for installation.But on my system now, there is no
/etc/locale.gen, though there mysteriously is a manpage for it. And the dpkg command just regenerates the English locales (all 15 of 'em, one for each dialect of English) without asking me anything.After some poking and prodding -- everything you'll find on Google describes the same procedure I gave two paragraphs up -- I finally discovered Ubuntu bug #48573, where someone basically says "Um, this used to work and it broke." And the response is, "That is intentional. We now have a Totally New Way to configure this and it's nicely controllable via System→Administration→Language Support."
Unfortunately I don't have a System→Administration→Language Support, nor do I know where to get one. Hrmph.
* I'm not really too upset about this, as I can recognize there may have been good reasons to make the change. On the other hand, I am upset that it was broken in such a way that I can't track down the fix.
Ubuntu Language Support
Odd. In my default Ubuntu Dapper desktop there's a System Menu, which has an Administration sub menu, and one of the options on that is Language Support. Which appears to allow one to pick languages via checkboxes.
It appears to run /usr/bin/gnome-language-selector. (Based on correlating what programs start when I choose that menu option; alas it doesn't seem easy to find out what's behind any given menu option :-( ). That appears to be in the "language-selector" package. Presumably installing said package gives one the option. It appears to be one of the dependencies of "ubuntu-desktop" and most other desktop meta packages (although the KDE desktop depends on "language-selector-qt", which I assume is equivilent).
Personally my Ubuntu locales annoyance is that en_NZ (my locale) is now defaulting to case insensitive sorting, and attempts to recompile the locale information with the "hey, case is important ya know" option turned on seem to be ignored. There's an "ignore case" option on sort (-f), but no "don't ignore case it's important" option, so now the choices for sort are "ignore case" or "ignore case". I don't consider this progress.
Ewen
PS: Yes, I know I can do LC_COLLATE=C sort. My point is I shouldn't have to.