Localization/Guide

Time zone
In order to keep time properly, you need to select your timezone so that your system knows where it is located. Look for your timezone in. You then set your timezone in. Please avoid the timezones as their names do not indicate the expected zones. For instance, is in fact GMT+8.

Suppose you want to use Brussels:

Now specify your timezone:

Hardware Clock
In most Gentoo Linux installations, your hardware clock is set to UTC (or GMT, Greenwich Mean Time) and then your timezone is taken into account to determine the actual, local time. If, for some reason, you need your hardware clock not to be in UTC, you will need to edit (or if you use Gentoo BSD: ) and change the value of   from   to.

Use UTC clock in /etc/conf.d/hwclock

Use local timezone clock in /etc/conf.d/hwclock

What are locales?
A Locale is a set of information that most programs use for determining country and language specific settings. The locales and their data are part of the system library and can be found at on most systems. A locale name is generally named  where   is your two (or three) letter language code (as specified in ISO-639) and   is your two letter country code (as specified in ISO-3166). Variants are often appended to locale names, e.g.  or. Please explore Wikipedia to read more about locales and related articles.

Environment variables for locales
Locale settings are stored in environment variables. These are typically set in the (for system-wide settings) and  (for user-specific settings) file. The variables controlling different aspects of locale settings are given in the table below. All of them take one name of a locale in  format given above.

Most typically users only set the LANG variable on the global basis. This example is for a Unicode German locale:

Setting the default system locale in /etc/env.d/02locale

A list of locales that can be used is provided as :

It's also possible, and pretty common especially in a more traditional UNIX environment, to leave the global settings unchanged, i.e. in the " " locale. Users can still specify their preferred locale in their own shell RC file:

Setting the user locale in ~/.bashrc

Another way of configuring system is to leave it in the default C locale, but enable UTF-8 character representation at the same time. This option is achieved using the following settings in :

Using traditional C locale while specifying UTF-8

Using the above snippet, users will be able to see localized file names properly, while not being forced to your preferred language.

For message based localization to work in programs that support it, you will probably need to have programs compiled with the  (Native language support) USE flag set. Most of the programs using nls also need the gettext library to extract and use localized messages. Of course, Portage will automatically install it when needed.

Once you have set the right locale, be sure to update your environment variables to make your system aware of the change.

For a system-wide default locale:

For a user-specific locale:

After this, you will need to kill your X server by pressing, log out, then log in as user.

Now, verify that the changes have taken effect:

There is also additional localization variable called LINGUAS, which affects to localization files that get installed in gettext-based programs, and decides used localization for some specific software packages, such as  and. The variable takes in space -separated list of language codes, and suggested place to set it is :

Generating Specific Locales
You will probably only use one or maybe two locales on your system. You can specify locales you will need in.

Adding locales to /etc/locale.gen

The next step is to run. It will generate all the locales you have specified in the file.

You can verify that your selected locales are available by running.

Keyboard layout for the console
The keyboard layout used by the console is set in by the   variable. Valid values can be found in. has further subdivisions into layout (,, etc.). Some languages have multiple options, so you may wish to experiment to decide which one fits your needs best.

Setting the console keymap

Keyboard layout for the X server
The keyboard layout to be used by the X server is specified in by the   option.

Setting the X keymap

If you have an international keyboard layout, you should set the option  to   or  , as this will allow mapping of the additional keys specific to your keyboard.

Deadkeys allow you to press keys that will not show immediately but will be combined with another letter to produce a single character. Setting  to   allows input these special characters into X terminals.

If you would like to switch between more than one keyboard layout (for example English and Russian), all you have to do is add a few lines to that specify the desired layouts and the shortcut command.

Switching between two keyboard layouts

Here,  allows you to toggle between keyboard layouts by simply pressing. This will also toggle the Scroll Lock light on or off, thanks to the  option. This is a handy visual indicator of which keyboard layout you are using at the moment.

KDE
For KDE you have to install the  and   packages. These respect the described earlier.

The Euro Symbol for the Console
In order to get your console to display the Euro symbol, you will need to set  in  to a file found in  (without the   ). has the Euro symbol.

Setting the console font

You should verify that  is in the boot runlevel:

If no runlevel is displayed for , then add it to the proper level:

Most Applications
Getting the Euro symbol to work properly in X is a little bit tougher. The first thing you should do is change the  and   definitions in  to end in   instead of.

Setting default X fonts

Some applications use their own font, and you will have to tell them separately to use a font with the Euro symbol. You can do this at a user-specific level in (you can copy this file to  for use by new users), or at a global level for any application with a resource file in  (like xterm). In these files you generally have to change an existing line, rather than adding a new one. To change our xterm font, for instance:

The Euro symbol in (X)Emacs
To use the Euro symbol in (X)Emacs, add the following to :

setting the font for emacs

For XEmacs (not plain Emacs), you have to do a little more. In, add:

setting the font for xemacs

LibreOffice
The current stable  and   ebuilds support the  for selecting installed GUI language packs. To see the status of GUI translation, hyphenation, spell checking and other localisations on your language, please refer to LibreOffice translation web site.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following authors and editors for their contributions to this guide:


 * Alexander Holler
 * Steven Lucy
 * Benny Chuang
 * Lars Weiler
 * Tobias Scherbaum
 * Flammie Pirinen
 * nightmorph
 * klondike