Xfce Forum

JLucien

Member

Registered: 2011-08-04

Posts: 3

Terminals Show Only English

I'm running xfce 4.8 on Archlinux and it seems that none of the terminal applications I have will show any other languages but English.  In place of other languages they just show question marks.

My locale is set:

$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
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=

I have "Encoding=UTF-8" in the /usr/share/applications/exo-terminal-emulator.desktop file.

When I dump the environment of the terminal process (tr \\0 \\n < /proc/$(terminal-pid)/environ) the LANG environment variable is empty.  For some reason, the terminal apps - Terminal Emulator, Gnome-terminal and xterm, are not picking up the locale.

I have "export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8" in my ~/.profile and ~/.bashrc.

I don't want to go back to GNOME3, can anyone help?

s0ulslack

Member

From: Idaho

Registered: 2005-12-25

Posts: 291

Re: Terminals Show Only English

Greetings!

I don't blame you on not wanting to go back, but have you read over the Arch wiki on setting the locale?  Might just need setup correctly, checkout https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Locale

If that doesn't work please post back so we can figure out what the problem is, no one should be forced to use G3 if they don't like it!  (does _anyone_ like it? )

JLucien

Member

Registered: 2011-08-04

Posts: 3

Re: Terminals Show Only English

Following the Arch wiki page:

$ locale -a
C
POSIX
en_GB
en_GB.iso88591
en_GB.utf8
en_US
en_US.iso88591
en_US.utf8

In /etc/rc.conf:

LOCALE="en_GB.UTF-8"

If I open gnome-terminal and go to Terminal -> Set Character Encoding it is set to ANSIX3.4-1968 (whatever that is!).  When I select Unicode it makes no difference.  I cannot remove the ANSI from the list and make Unicode the default, even if I select Unicode and then try to get rid of the ANSI entry.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

JLucien

Member

Registered: 2011-08-04

Posts: 3

Re: Terminals Show Only English

Update:

I have been working on this and have got this far - I opened the /usr/share/applications/Terminal.desktop file with 'sudo gedit'.  I then saved it with UTF-8 encoding.

If I then start the any of the terminal apps with ALT+F2 and "env LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 Terminal", and cat the /usr/share/applications/Terminal.desktop file it looks fine - just as it should! (apart from the [dz] entries, but I don't even know what language that would be).

However, if I cat any of the other .desktop files, i.e. chromium.desktop, then I see a jumble of question marks as usual.  If I open the chromium.desktop file with 'sudo gedit' I see that it's encoding is the ANSI_X3.4-1968.

If I switch to a console using CTRL+ALT+F1 I see the jumble also.  Just to point out, in X everything looks fine.

So, I have a clue as to what is going on, but how on earth can I set every file on my system to UTF-8 encoding?  I shouldn't have to do that as G3 doesn't have this problem at all.  I still can't figure out how to fix this.  Does this help?

Edit:  Changing login manager from gdm to slim enables the correct locale in the terminal apps.  However, only files that have been specifically saved with UTF-8 encoding are displaying properly.

Last edited by JLucien (2011-08-05 16:12:49)