LANG=en_US.UTF-8
This is the default setting if American English is selected during installation. If you
selected another language, that language is enabled but still with UTF-8 as the
character encoding.
LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1
This sets the language to English, country to United States and the character set to
ISO-8859-1. This character set does not support the Euro sign, but it can be
useful sometimes for programs that have not been updated to support UTF-8. The
string dening the charset (ISO-8859-1 in this case) is then evaluated by pro-
grams like Emacs.
LANG=en_IE@euro
The above example explicitly includes the Euro sign in a language setting. This
setting is basically obsolete now, as UTF-8 also covers the Euro symbol. It is only
useful if an application supports ISO-8859-15 and not UTF-8.
In former releases, it was necessary to run SuSEconfig after doing any changes to
/etc/sysconfig/language. SuSEcong then wrote the changes to /etc/
SuSEconfig/profile and /etc/SuSEconfig/csh.login. Upon login,
these les were read by /etc/profile (for the Bash) or by /etc/csh.login
(for the tcsh) .
In recent releases, /etc/SuSEconfig/profile has been replaced with /etc/
profile.d/lang.sh, and /etc/SuSEconfig/csh.login with /etc/
profile.de/lang.csh. But if they exist, both legacy le are still read upon login.
The process chain is now as follows:
•
For the Bash: /etc/profile reads /etc/profile.d/lang.sh which, in
turn, analyzes /etc/sysconfig/language.
•
For tcsh: At login, /etc/csh.login reads /etc/profile.d/lang.csh
which, in turn, analyzes /etc/sysconfig/language.
This ensures that any changes to /etc/sysconfig/language are available at the
next login to the respective shell, without having to run SuSEcong rst.
Special System Features 203
