Yast and LANG .. no connection?

English Applications
1

running “env” from the command line shows
LANG=en_IE.US-ASCII

I want to change this as I definitely want utf-8 support.
Dont know how ascii got there … maybe I oversaw some default setting in the installer.
No matter what I do in YAST - Langauge
Ive tried setting the primary langauge to German, reboot, back to English etc…nothing seems to alter the LANG envrironment variable … shouldn’t it?
Isnt this what Yast-Langugae is for setting my locale (including LANG) ?

Thanks very much in Advance.

2

Lang is set in at least two places 1 in yast for system function and then in the desktop since different user may want different language settings,

3

Well what I do in Yast seems to make no difference? Would have thought calling env on the command line is a “system function”?

In StartMenu - Settings- System Settings - Regional Settings (presumably this is what you mean by the “desktop”) , I have
Preferred Languages:
British English
Deutsch

Neither correspond to US and I cant see anywhere to specify the encoding (ie ascii vs utf-8)

Any elaboration /clarification would be appreciated

4

Yast sets system settings what ever desktop you use sets personal settings. Remember Linux is multi user and each user can have their own settings.

5

I understand.
However my question remains:
How can I use the GUI to change
“LANG=en_IE.US-ASCII”
to say
“LANG=en_US.UTF-8” ?

And why does neither changing the language setting in Yast nor the StartMenu - Settings- System Settings - Regional Settings
seem to affect the value of “LANG”?

6

In general the langauge/locale settings in the ui seem to be a mess.
Despite having “English” as the main/preferred language in both yast and system settings, my ui is partly in German and partly in English
(ironically both the yast ui and the ui for system settings are in German even though the settings made there say “use English”)!

7

YaST → System → Language → Details → Use UTF-8 Encoding

8

Thanks for the suggestion.
utf-8 checkbox is selected here. However
> echo $LANG
en_IE.US-ASCII

9

Please check /etc/sysconfig/language – on this machine RC_LANG=“de_DE.UTF-8” and INSTALLED_LANGUAGES=“de_DE,en_GB” – both set-up via YaST –>> System –>> Language (Details).
If YaST is misbehaving, you may have some extraneous characters or an “off-limits” value in /etc/sysconfig/language.
In addition check the user’s .profile and .bashrc files – in .profile there should be something like export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 – this should never be in .bashrc.
Please note the following comment in .bashrc located in /etc/skel/:


# NOTE: It is recommended to make language settings in ~/.profile rather than
# here, since multilingual X sessions would not work properly if LANG is over-
# ridden in every subshell.