[ILUG] International configuration

[David Neary]

Hi all,

Being where I am, and the year being what it is, I've become more
interested in international support, and how to configure stuff
to behave appropriately to the language environment. I've had
some success, but I'm still having problems, which are (probably)
associated to a lack of understanding at to how everything fits
together. Some of the things I haven't been able to do are...

(1) Get console fonts to support iso8859-15
(2) Draw accented characters in the console (in X I use a compose
    key, which I set using xmodmap)
(3) Set the X11 defaults to have the same compose key system wide
    (probably just an issue of creating /etc/xmodmaprc)
(4) Figure out how to get ispell/aspell to spellchck in the
    appropriate language

and the list goes on...

Could someone explain to me how the default case works (that is,
when someone boots a computer, and logs in, what devices exist to
get their language environment to an appropriate default), in
terms of where things get done, and by whom?

In other words, when I log onto a machine, how much of
international support is the kernel, how much is init, how much
is other stuff in rcs, how much is up to the individual
application, or the user's environment, etc... And if a large
part is due to a user's environment, then at what stage is that
environment sourced for an application launched through X, rather
than from a shell?

And finally is it possible to get aspell to recognise the
language that a file is written in, and to get it to load the
appropriate language automagically? If not, how can I specify at
run-time the language to check with?

Lots of questions, sorry...

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
          David Neary,
     E-Mail: bolsh at gimp.org
      IRL: Marseille, France