Version: (using KDE KDE 3.5.4) Installed from: Ubuntu Packages I installed the latest Kubuntu in English, making sure I selected British too, to be sure. However, I noticed the Regional & Accessibility section of the KDE System Settings shows my languages as "US English", Money is $, although it has paper format A4 and Metric measurement system. Is the /locale/ of the system not honoured by KDE? This is my locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_ALL= Thanks
KDE uses the KDE_LANG environment variable for its language. I suspect this is a configuration/packaging problem: make sure you have the kde-i18n-en_GB package (or whatever the appropriate name is) installed, and then select "British English" in control center -> regional & a11y -> country/region & language
Hi, I have that package installed, and I manually set it to "British English". Btw, KDE_LANG is not set by Kubuntu 6.06. Perhaps they did not know that. However, I don't understand why KDE doesn't use LANG, LC_CTYPE etc? Is there a reason it does not follow convention? IMHO I think it should follow convention. Kind regards Jon
Hi Jon, I'm not sure if this problem is actually a bug in KDE or a problem with Kubuntu. Could you also report it to the kubuntu bug tracking system (launchpad.net), so the kubuntu developers can take a look? Please also add a link to this bug in the kubuntu bug report, and a link to the kubuntu bug report in this one. With regard to why KDE does/doesn't use $LANG, I'm afraid I don't know. You could try asking on the kde-devel@kde.org mailing list.
Hi Philip, Thanks for your reply. I posted on launchpad.net a few weeks ago, this is the bug: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bug/28226 Unfortunately they have not replied to my query, and have now closed the bug. I'll post to kde-devel email list shortly. Cheers Jon
The KDE locale system predates the use of system locale on Linux. It is also used in other Unix systems as such. The KDE global configuration overrides any $LANG value and this will not change. Hence, a new overriding variable was introduced, but it's not supposed to be used unless you want to run a KDE application in a different language setting than the one configured in KControl. So, what language is selected in the KDE Control Centre?
Thiago, thanks for explanation, however this is a bit odd. What if you would like to run KDE and KDE apps in Unicode (just an example) but old software in old ASCII (ISO-8859-1). If KDE overrides LANG, it means the user should re-override them back whenever she/he run old apps. But those issues are minor. If there is KDE_LANG in KDE why it is not in the system? KDE 3.5.8 -- I have no entries related to KDE and locale settings. Only pure unix ones (like LANG).
PS. If there is KDE_LANG (in theory) variable wouldn't it cause problems of compability KDE<>GNOME<>ICEWM<>whatever? After all the common divisor is more likely LANG unix variable not KDE_LANG. I don't know how this thing is described in freedesktop for example.
In about KDE 4.6 we started defaulting the KDE locale to the system locale $LANG (but not all the LC_* sub-variants), which resolved the initial problem, however Plasma still doesn't set the usual locale envvars at startup. In Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 we've dropped our own KLocale localization system and now use QLocale, as a result we now read and use all the LC_* envvars as well, and Plasma now also exports any user customised settings at startup for all apps to use.