Locale settings
The locale setting contains country specific settings like correct displaying of specific characters (read: Non-ASCII characters). You may either decide to give different users different locales, then you would place this in the corresponding ./profile in the users home dir. If you decide to use a machine wide setting, I'd reccomend putting it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local, since this will speed up the login process. This is the setting for germany, you may find your corresponding localedefinition here along with other useful information about internationalisation (i18n) and localisation (i10n)
echo "Setting locale"
/usr/bin/localedef -i de_DE -f ISO-8859-1 de_DE
Further you need to alter either your /etc/profile (for a machine wide setting) or create following lines in the corresponding ./profile. For /etc/profile find the line "export LC_ALL=POSIX" and alter (or create)
export LC_ALL=de_DE
export LANG=de
Finally, if you plan to use non-ASCII characters in Filenames (which is a potential source for problems), you need to load native language support for your filesystem. When building a custom kernel, this can be done by selecting the appropiate codepage while configuring the kernel. In case you use "make menuconfig", you select filesystem/native language support (CONFIG_NLS=y CONFIG_NLS_DEFAULT="iso8859-1" CONFIG_NLS_ISO8859_1=y). Again, replace iso8859-1 with your appropiate codepage. Of course you can build the codepage(s) as modules and load them with "modprobe nls_iso8859-1", which would be the preferred way if you plan to use more than one codepage. You can autoload the module during startup by putting "/sbin/modprobe nls_iso8859-1" in your /etc/rc.d/rc.modules.
If use don't plan to build your own kernel, have a look in /lib/modules/kernel/fs - where "kernel" is your kernel verion (example: /lib/modules/2.2.17/fs for kernel-2.2.17) - wether your desired codepage has been installed already and load it with modprobe.
Contributed by: Thomas W.
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