Czech and national environment

Unix systems on FI allow flexible locale settings. The two basic options are language setting and encoding.

The language setting tells you how the programs should talk to you. In which language are the menus, error and other messages and the like. The encoding settings define the encoding in which the documents in the editors, the menu statements and other texts that the system displays are.

You can find out your current settings by entering the command:

locale

on the command line. This command displays a set of variables that define the behavior of the locale (time format, phone numbers, monetary units, and so on). The format consists of two parts separated by a dot, for example: cs_CZ.ISO8859-2 .

First part cs_CZ defines the Czech language. Other options are for example en_US, sk_SK, fr_FR and many others. This section defines which language to use to communicate with the user.

Second part ISO8859-2 defines the encoding according to which the texts are interpreted. Other options are: ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, koi8r and many others.

All setting options that the system knows can be listed with the command

locale -a

If we want to change the settings, for example, to English with UTF-8 encoding (which we found as an option in the list of the previous command), we do so with the command:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

in the file ~/.profile .