Set language

If you look at /etc/profile.d/lang.sh in your favorite text editor you will see a section that looks like this:

# en_US is the Slackware default locale:
export LANG=en_US

If I wanted my system in Canadian French I could change this section as follows:

# en_US is the Slackware default locale:
export LANG=fr_CA
export LANGUAGE=fr_CA
export LINGUAS=fr_CA
export LC_ALL=fr_CA

You could optionally add .utf8 for Unicode support to each line. Some old applications don't handle Unicode properly. On the other hand, if you use a language that has non-Latin glyphs Unicode is pretty much mandatory. Some Slackware derivatives now use Unicode as part of their default setting even in English. If I'm setting up a system to work in Israeli Hebrew this section would read:

# en_US is the Slackware default locale:
export LANG=he_IL.utf8
export LANGUAGE=he_IL.utf8
export LINGUAS=he_IL.utf8
export LC_ALL=he_IL.utf8

If you're not sure what the language and locale codes are the command:

locale -av

will give you a detailed alphabetical list. It's a very long listing so you may want to pipe the output to more or redirect it to a file.

lang.csh is similar with the setenv command replacing the export command. A stock Slackware lang.csh file will have code that looks like:

# en_US is the Slackware default locale:
setenv LANG en_US

As in lang.sh you replace en_US with the language and locale you want and you include all four variables. Brazilian Portuguese with Unicode support looks like this:

# en_US is the Slackware default locale:
setenv LANG pt_BR.utf8
setenv LANGUAGE pt_BR.utf8
setenv LINGUAS pt_BR.utf8
setenv LC_ALL pt_BR.utf8

By Caitlin Martin 2009