Locales in Xfce4

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Peter Humphrey wrote:
> Recently I asked about date formats for the Date and Time panel
> extension and got useful help - thanks all. But it seems my problem is
> wider in scope - it turns out that Xfce doesn't know about locales, yet
> Mozilla-Thunderbird expects to inherit the locale from the underlying
> desktop environment. How do I fix this? I can't find anything about it
> in any of the documentation.

Overall, setting the LANG environment variable before starting Xfce
(usually in your X startup scripts, either ~/.xinitrc, ~/.xsession, or
possibly by copying $sysconfdir/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc to ~/.config/xfce4/
and editing that) should do what you want.  There are a bunch of LC_*
environment variables that you can use if you want to only set certain
portions of the C library to another locale.  Running 'locale' from the
command line should tel you what these are.

You're operating under something of a flawed assumption: it's not the
desktop environment's 'job', per se, to set the locale, but the
environment as a whole.  If you're running something like GDM, I believe
you can set a language when you log in (though I don't believe you can
set any fine-grained LC_* locales).

On the other hand, it probably wouldn't hurt to have a 'regional'
settings panel that writes a locale to a file in ~/.config/xfce4, and
then have the stock xinitrc read that and set whatever's needed.  Of
course, someone needs to write it ^_~.  File a feature request on
Bugzilla; that sounds like something that isn't too complicated, though
it does require some knowledge of MCS plugins.

	-brian

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