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5. Locale support in libc 5.4.x

The locale support has been updated in libc 5.4.x. You can avoid many of the individual programs setups described in section International character sets in specific applications if the programs on your system is prepared for locale support. The Debian distribution comes with this support if you install the wg15-locale package. Read the Locales mini-HOWTO if you want to set up locale support on a non-Debian system.

To enable support for the Danish locale you just have to set one of the following environment variables:

LANG=da_DK.ISO_8859-1
or
LC_ALL=da_DK.ISO_8859-1

The difference between LANG and LC_ALL is, that while LANG can be overridden for the individual locale categories, LC_ALL can't. Both environment variables set all the individual locale catgories. See the Locales mini-HOWTO for information about locale categories.

A few programs such as bash and GNU emacs still needs specific setup, but most should work without further attention. Programs such as nvi which didn't work with 8 bit characters before should work now.

Locale support should be more common as distributions based on the new GNU libc 2 (libc 6.x) becomes available.


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