Índice
$LANG
"Multilingualization (M17N) or Native Language Support for an application software is done in 2 steps.
![]() |
Dica |
---|---|
There are 17, 18, or 10 letters between "m" and "n", "i" and "n", or "l" and "n" in multilingualization, internationalization, and localization which correspond to M17N, I18N, and L10N. |
The modern software such as GNOME and KDE are multilingualized. They are
internationalized by making them handle UTF-8
data and localized by providing their translated messages through the
gettext
(1) infrastructure. Translated messages may be
provided as separate localization packages. They can be selected simply by
setting pertinent environment variables to the appropriate locale.
The simplest representation of the text data is ASCII which is sufficient for English and uses less than 127 characters (representable with 7 bits). In order to support much more characters for the international support, many character encoding systems have been invented. The modern and sensible encoding system is UTF-8 which can handle practically all the characters known to the human (see Secção 8.3.1, “Bases de codificação”).
Veja Introdução ao i18n para mais detalhes.
O suporte a hardware internacional é activado com dados de configuração de hardware localizados.
O sistema Debian pode ser configurado para funcionar com muitas disposições internacionais de teclado.
Tabela 8.1. Lista de métodos de configuração do teclado
ambiente | comando |
---|---|
Consola do Linux |
dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low console-data
|
X Window |
dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low xserver-xorg
|
This supports keyboard input for accented characters of many European languages with its dead-key function. For Asian languages, you need more complicated input method support such as IBus discussed next.
Setup of multilingual input for the Debian system is simplified by using the
IBus family of packages with the
im-config
package. The list of IBus packages are the
following.
Tabela 8.2. Lista de suportes a método de entrada com IBus
pacote | popcon | tamanho | locale suportado |
---|---|---|---|
ibus * | V:0.2, I:0.2 | 4220 | estrutura de método de entrada que usa dbus |
ibus-anthy * | V:0.04, I:0.10 | 684 | Japonês |
ibus-skk * | V:0.00, I:0.03 | 404 | , , |
ibus-pinyin * | V:0.06, I:0.09 | 1184 | Chinês (para zh_CN) |
ibus-chewing * | V:0.01, I:0.02 | 252 | , , (para zh_TW) |
ibus-hangul * | V:0.01, I:0.03 | 216 | Coreano |
ibus-table * | V:0.05, I:0.10 | 680 | motor de tabela para IBus |
ibus-table-thai * | I:0.00 | 156 160 | Thai |
ibus-unikey * | V:0.00, I:0.00 | 316 | Vietnamita |
ibus-m17n * | V:0.02, I:0.05 | 180 | Multilingue: Indiano, Árabe e outros |
The kinput2 method and other locale dependent Asian classic input methods still exist but are not recommended for the modern UTF-8 X environment. The SCIM and uim tool chains are an slightly older approach for the international input method for the modern UTF-8 X environment.
I find the Japanese input method started under English environment
("en_US.UTF-8
") very useful. Here is how I did this with
IBus.
ibus-anthy
with
its recommended packages such as im-config
.
im-config
" a partir da shell de utilizador e
seleccione "ibus
".
im-config
".
Por favor note o seguinte.
im-config
(8) behaves differently if command is executed
from root or not.
im-config
(8) activa o melhor método de entrada do sistema
e é predefinido sem qualquer acção do utilizador.
im-config
(8) is disable as default
to prevent cluttering.
If you wish to input without going through XIM, set
"$XMODIFIERS
" value to "none" while starting a
program. This may be the case if you use Japanese input infrastructure
egg
on emacs
(1). From shell, execute
as the following.
$ XMODIFIERS=none emacs
In order to adjust the command executed by the Debian menu, place customized
configuration in "/etc/menu/
" following method described
in "/usr/share/doc/menu/html
".
Linux console can only display limited characters. (You need to use special
terminal program such as jfbterm
(1) to display
non-European languages on the non-X console.)
X Window can display any characters in the UTF-8 as long as required font data exists. (The encoding of the original font data is taken care by the X Window System and transparent to the user.)
The following focuses on the locale for applications run under X Window
environment started from gdm
(1).
The environment variable "LANG=xx_YY.ZZZZ
" sets the
locale to language code "xx
", country code
"yy
", and encoding "ZZZZ
" (see Secção 1.5.2, “variável "$LANG
"”).
Current Debian system normally sets the locale as
"LANG=xx_YY.UTF-8
". This uses the UTF-8 encoding with the Unicode character set. This UTF-8 encoding system is a multibyte code system and
uses code points smartly. The ASCII data, which
consist only with 7-bit range codes, are always valid UTF-8 data consisting
only with 1 byte per character.
Previous Debian system used to set the locale as "LANG=C
"
or "LANG=xx_YY
" (without ".UTF-8
").
LANG=C
" or "LANG=POSIX
".
LANG=xx_YY
".
Actual traditional encoding system used for "LANG=xx_YY
"
can be identified by checking
"/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
". For example,
"en_US
" uses "ISO-8859-1
" encoding and
"fr_FR@euro
" uses "ISO-8859-15
"
encoding.
![]() |
Dica |
---|---|
For meaning of encoding values, see Tabela 11.2, “Lista de valores de codificação e a sua utilização”. |
The UTF-8 encoding is the modern and sensible text encoding system for I18N and enables to represent Unicode characters, i.e., practically all characters known to human. UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes.
I recommend to use UTF-8 locale for your
desktop, e.g., "LANG=en_US.UTF-8
". The first part of the
locale determines messages presented by applications. For example,
gedit
(1) (text editor for the GNOME Desktop) under
"LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
" locale can display and edit Chinese
character text data while presenting menus in French, as long as required
fonts and input methods are installed.
I also recommend to set the locale only using the "$LANG
"
environment variable. I do not see much benefit of setting a complicated
combination of "LC_*
" variables (see
locale
(1)) under UTF-8 locale.
Even plain English text may contain non-ASCII characters, e.g. left and right quotation marks are not available in ASCII.
“double quoted text” ‘single quoted text’
When ASCII plain text data is converted to UTF-8 one, it has exactly the same content and size as the original ASCII one. So you loose nothing by deploying UTF-8 locale.
Some programs consume more memory after supporting I18N. This is because they are coded to use UTF-32(UCS4) internally to support Unicode for speed optimization and consume 4 bytes per each ASCII character data independent of locale selected. Again, you loose nothing by deploying UTF-8 locale.
The vendor specific old non-UTF-8 encoding systems tend to have minor but annoying differences on some characters such as graphic ones for many countries. The deployment of the UTF-8 system by the modern OSs practically solved these conflicting encoding issues.
In order for the system to access a particular locale, the locale data must
be compiled from the locale database. (The Debian system does not come with all available locales pre-compiled
unless you installed the locales-all
package.) The full
list of supported locales available for compiling are listed in
"/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
". This lists all the proper
locale names. The following lists all the available UTF-8 locales already
compiled to the binary form.
$ locale -a | grep utf8
A execução do comando seguinte reconfigura o pacote
locales
.
# dpkg-reconfigure locales
Este processo involve 3 passos.
/etc/defaults/locale
" para usar com o PAM (veja Secção 4.5, “PAM e NSS”)
The list of available locale should include "en_US.UTF-8
"
and all the interesting languages with "UTF-8
".
The recommended default locale is "en_US.UTF-8
" for US
English. For other languages, please make sure to chose locale with
"UTF-8
". Any one of these settings can handle any
international characters.
![]() |
Nota |
---|---|
Although setting locale to " |
O valor da variável de ambiente "$LANG
" é definido e
alterado por muitas aplicações.
login
(1) for the
local Linux console programs
ssh
(1) for the
remote console programs
gdm
(1) for all X
programs
~/.xsessionrc
"
for all X programs (lenny
feature)
~/.bashrc
", for
all console programs
![]() |
Dica |
---|---|
It is good idea to install system wide default locale as
" |
You can chose specific locale only under X Window irrespective of your system wide default locale using PAM customization (see Secção 4.5, “PAM e NSS”) as follows.
This environment should provide you with your best desktop experience with stability. You have access to the functioning character terminal with readable messages even when the X Window System is not working. This becomes essential for languages which use non-roman characters such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
![]() |
Nota |
---|---|
There may be another way available as the improvement of X session manager
package but please read following as the generic and basic method of setting
the locale. For |
The following line defines file location of the language environment in the
PAM configuration file, such as "/etc/pam.d/gdm
.
auth required pam_env.so read_env=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale
Mude isto para o seguinte.
auth required pam_env.so read_env=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale-x
For Japanese, create a "/etc/defaults/locale-gdm
" file
with "-rw-r--r-- 1 root root
" permission containing the
following.
LANG="ja_JP.UTF-8"
Manter o ficheiro "/etc/defaults/locale
" predefinido para
outros programas com o seguinte.
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
This is the most generic technique to customize locale and makes the menu
selection dialog of gdm
(1) itself to be localized.
Alternatively for this case, you may simply change locale using the
"~/.xsessionrc
" file.
For cross platform data exchanges (see Secção 10.1.10, “Dispositivo de armazenamento amovível”), you may need to mount some
filesystem with particular encodings. For example,
mount
(8) for vfat
filesystem assumes CP437 if used
without option. You need to provide explicit mount option to use UTF-8 or CP932 for
filenames.
![]() |
Nota |
---|---|
When auto-mounting a hot-pluggable USB memory stick under modern desktop environment such as GNOME, you may provide such mount option by right clicking the icon on the desktop, click "Drive" tab, click to expand "Setting", and entering "utf8" to "Mount options:". The next time this memory stick is mounted, mount with UTF-8 is enabled. |
![]() |
Nota |
---|---|
If you are upgrading system or moving disk drives from older non-UTF-8 system, file names with non-ASCII characters may be encoded in the historic and deprecated encodings such as ISO-8859-1 or eucJP. Please seek help of text conversion tools to convert them to UTF-8. See Secção 11.1, “Ferramentas de conversão de dados em texto”. |
Samba uses Unicode for newer clients (Windows
NT, 200x, XP) but uses CP850 for older clients
(DOS and Windows 9x/Me) as default. This default for older clients can be
changed using "dos charset
" in the
"/etc/samba/smb.conf
" file, e.g., to CP932 for Japanese.
Translations exist for many of the text messages and documents that are displayed in the Debian system, such as error messages, standard program output, menus, and manual pages. GNU gettext(1) command tool chain is used as the backend tool for most translation activities.
aptitude
(8) lists under "Tasks" → "Localization" provide
extensive list of useful binary packages which add localized messages to
applications and provide translated documentation.
For example, you can obtain the localized message for manpage by installing
the manpages-<LANG>
package. To read the
Italian-language manpage for <programname> from
"/usr/share/man/it/
", execute as the following.
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 man <nome_do_programa>
The sort order of characters with sort
(1) is affected by
the language choice of the locale. Spanish and English locale sort
differently.
The date format of ls
(1) is affected by the locale. The
date format of "LANG=C ls -l
" and
"LANG=en_US.UTF-8
" are different (see Secção 9.2.5, “Amostragem personalizada de hora e data”).
Number punctuation are different for locales. For example, in English
locale, one thousand one point one is displayed as
"1,000.1
" while in German locale, it is displayed as
"1.000,1
". You may see this difference in spreadsheet
program.