[ILUG] International configuration

[Robert Bracewell]

<snip>

>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?

<snip>

Well I have recently been through the process of configuring my notebook
which has a German layout but as I am now in Ireland I needed support
for the Irish locale.

Briefly below are the steps I took to enable full support for accented
characters, Euro symbols, correct keyboard mappings etc. from a console.
I did have all working in X11 V4.2.0 lately but I was playing around
with the Fluxbox Window Manager and I have now lost the Euro and the ~
characters - maybe they will return if I switch back to Enlightenment...

I do not have a mainstream distro installed (instead I have an LFS
system - www.linuxfromscratch.com) so I cant say simply run a setup tool
to reconfigure it for you.

My configuration uses a bash shell so briefly below is what I did to
enable console support and X11 support.

1. within my RC scripts I created a new script to load the correct
keyboard settings, this being based on the architecture (i386) and
keyboard layout (for me qwertz) so I have a line that says /bin/loadkeys
/usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwertz/de-latin1-nodeadkeys.map.gz

2. locales can be used to make all this available within your
environment - within my .bash_profile I have the following lines
export LC_CTYPE=en_IE at euro
export LANG=en_IE at euro
export LANGUAGE=en_IE
export LC_MESSAGES=en_IE

3. modify your inputrc file to configure support for 8-bit i/o. Reason
being most of the non-ascii character set lie outside the 7-bit range.
As an example I have the following:
set convert-meta off # do not convert 8-bit to 7-bit
set input-meta on    # allow input of 8-bit
set output-meta off  # show output in 8-bit

4. setting the console font - I use a small consolefont but you can
experiment. Within my .bash_profile I have the following:
if [ "${TERM}" = "linux" ]; then
	/usr/bin/setfont /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts/lat9w-12.psfu.gz
fi

The reason this has an if statement around is it because it causes
problems under X11 when running Eterm.

5. Within X11 I modified the XF86Comfig file to contain:
option "XkbLayout" "de"

I also created my own Eterm user.cfg which uses an ISO 15 aware font
which contain Euro symbols etc.
But seeing as I don't seem to have support for the Euro anymore I should
really try and figure out what I changed.

If none of this makes sense then let me know and I will go into more
detailed instructions. I would advise tailoring the above so that you
place the various parts into the global /etc/profile and /etc/inputrc
that way you can just include them in the user files rather than having
to type out for all accounts.

--
RoB


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