[H-GEN] UTF-8 vs ISO-8859-1

[Ted Percival]

Inline responses are a scroll or two down the message...

Troy Piggins wrote:
> * Ted Percival <ted at midg3t.net> :
>> Troy Piggins wrote:
>>> Further to this, I can find no way to change to ISO-8859-1 if I
>>> wanted to.  Seems to be a common Dapper problem from my
>>> google/ubuntuforums searches so far.
>> Try `dpkg-reconfigure locales` (as root) and enable en_AU.ISO-8859-1.
>> You should then be able to use it.
> 
> $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
> Generating locales...
>   en_AU.UTF-8... up-to-date
(snip many more locales)
> Generation complete.
> Current default timezone: 'Australia/Brisbane'.
> Local time is now:      Fri Jun 23 14:20:50 EST 2006.
> Universal Time is now:  Fri Jun 23 04:20:50 UTC 2006.
> Run 'tzconfig' if you wish to change it.

Eh. Maybe the list of locales is a low-priority question. Try
`dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales` or just add the following to
/etc/locale.gen:

en_AU ISO-8859-1

and re-run `locale-gen`. That should make it possible to set
LANG=en_AU.ISO-8859-1 without errors.

>> If there's a problem changing it after that, check that it's not being
>> forced in /etc/environment.
> 
> $ cat /etc/environment
> PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games"
> LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
> LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"

If you want to change the default locale for your whole system, rather
than setting LANG in your shell's rc file so it only applies to that
user account, read on.

I found this on my travels in /var/lib/dpkg/info/locales.config:
# Prior to locales 2.3.6-5, variables were stored in /etc/environment

So you've probably either got an old(er) version of the locales package,
or you've got data leftover from an old version in /etc/environment. My
/etc/environment file is completely commented-out, and `apt-cache policy
locales` says version 2.3.6-15 is installed. Of course this is a Debian
system so it's possible that Ubuntu handles locales differently, but I
doubt it.

I suggest commenting-out the LANG and LANGUAGE lines in /etc/environment
if you want to change the default globally. If that works it might be
reasonable to comment out the PATH and other things, though your mileage
might vary.

-Ted