Czech and locale

Unix systems on FI enable flexible locale settings. Two basic options are language and encoding settings.

Language settings tell you how programs should talk to you. In what language are menus, error and other messages, and so on. The encoding setting defines in what encoding the documents in the editors, menu listings and other texts that the system displays.

To determine your current settings, enter:

 locale 

on the command line. This command displays a set of variables that define the locale behavior (time format, phone numbers, monetary units, etc.). The format consists of two parts separated by a period, for example:

cs_CZ.ISO8859-2

First part

cs_CZ

defines the Czech language. Other options are:

en_US
sk_SK
fr_FR

and many others. This section defines which language should be used 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 known to the system can be listed by command

locale -a

For example, if you want to change the setting to English with UTF-8 encoding (which we found as an option in the list of the previous command), we do this by:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

in the ~ / .profile file.