How can I change my system’s default character encoding? I need to change it to ISO-8859-1 for compatibility reasons, but I can’t find an option for this…
I suspect you will have to do it on an application by application basis. Most have an option to do this on export where it isn’t built in anyway.
jwesleycooper wrote:
> How can I change my system’s default character encoding? I need to
> change it to ISO-8856-1 for compatibility reasons, but I can’t find an
> option for this…
i may be wrong but i don’t think there is a system wide setting that
would affect all users and/or all applications…
i think each user has the chance to set each application to what is
wanted by THAT user for THAT application…remember, openSUSE and
Linux is a multi-user system from the ground up…that is to say one
user might normally want ISO-8859-4, while another (you maybe) might
want ISO-8856-1 in both browser and email but, occasionally wanna
swtich to ISO-8859-2 to exchange email with granny in the old country…
so, look within the setup for the applications you use, and other
users can do the same…
here, in Firefox i go: Menu > Edit > Preferences > Content > Fonts &
Colors > Advanced > Character Encoding > spin the Default Character
Encoding to the desired…
but, i do not see an 8856-1 offered…i guess could be because i
don’t have that language installed on my machine (?)
the setting for my Thunderbird mailer is similar…i guess you will
find it similar on whatever you use for email, browsing, letter
writing, etc…
if you have a particular application or desktop environment and need
more help, just specify the question…
–
palladium
You can look at the LC_TYPE and LANG shell variables.
Martin Helm wrote:
> You can look at the LC_TYPE and LANG shell variables.
Sorry a typo it is
LC_CTYPE and LANG
The app in question is a 3rd party Java IDE, which was required by my course and I had to manually extract into my filesystem… It gave me a message telling me that copy/paste functionality might not work correctly if I didn’t change to said encoding… so how would I fix the copy/past encoding defaults then?
The question is: what would you be copying to/from? If you are only copying to/from say Kate, then all you need to do is change the encoding used in Kate.
AFAIK the copy/paste buffer won’t change whatever is in it; the differences in encoding will only be apparent when you paste to/from an application which expects a different encoding.
jwesleycooper wrote:
> The app in question is a 3rd party Java IDE, which was required by my
> course
i now guess you are learning about ‘developing’ IT applications as
part of school course work?
since one purpose of education is to learn how to solve problem, i
guess your current problem is finding where the answer is already laid
out for you…
hint 1: my guess is it is in the IDE’s documentation…perhaps in the
application’s README or help files (in my experience most folks who
build a multi-platform capable application go to the trouble of
telling folks HOW to use it on there platform…therefore, their may
even be a README.linux file)… or a help forum like this one, but
hosted by the 3rd party application…or in Java information available
at your school, or on the net…have you looked in any/all of those
places?)
hint 2: for sure, i do not think you really want to change your
system wide default ISO just to run that one application…
hint3: instead set a session’s environment as suggested by Martin Helm
and THEN launch your Java app into it
hint 4: see man set
and (maybe), make a script with a set statement and a launch command…
i don’t know how to do that–but, i’m neither a developer nor learning
to be one…
good luck…
–
palladium
What version of the distro are you using? That matters!
Assuming 11.2: start yast, then go to
System —> Language —> Details and uncheck “Use UTF-8 Encoding”. Then select the desired locale setting. Click ‘OK’ and reboot.
Expect some surprises. E.g the default encoding for MySQL is set to UTF-8 since version 11.2. And all filenames using characters outside the ASCII range must be fixed.
jwesleycooper wrote:
>
> The app in question is a 3rd party Java IDE, which was required by my
> course and I had to manually extract into my filesystem… It gave me a
> message telling me that copy/paste functionality might not work
> correctly if I didn’t change to said encoding… so how would I fix the
> copy/past encoding defaults then?
>
>
If you need to change the default encoding for the java application you can
simply do it by looking at the way it is started.
Java apps are often started with something like
java -Xmx200M -jar something.jar
just as an example.
Add the following variable to it
java -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 … (the remaining original command line)
But google for it I wrote this down from memory.