[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to configure user's locale - is this broken?

[James Madgwick]

Hello,

After a recent install, my user's locale was not correct. The docs do
not currently cover how to fix this. I intend to add this information,
but first I need to understand the current behaviour.

Changing the LANG value in `/etc/default/init` only changed the login
greeter language and not MATE environment after logging in. The `locale`
command still returned "en_US" for all variables.

Adding the overriding LC_ALL to `/etc/default/init` triggered a locale
change for my local user. The first time I set it the desktop session
language changed persistently, such that after removing LC_ALL it
remained on this language and reverted back to it after setting LC_ALL
to a different language and then unsetting it.

It should be possible to configure the locale on a per user basis. MATE
can use a GUI tool called "gnome-language-selector" for this, but it
doesn't seem to be packaged on OI. It also seems it should be
configurable using `.config/locale.conf`, which didn't work for me.

I switched between various languages to test this and from what I can
tell, profile language is persisted somewhere in MATE/lightdm config,
but not in a local file - if I connect via ssh I get the default LANG,
not what is used for the desktop session.

The problem is that I cannot find a way to change the desktop session
language (other than overriding using LC_ALL at the whole system
level). Using `.config/locale.conf` should work but doesn't. This
desktop specific LANG is being set somewhere outside of the user's
home.

In addition, there ought to be a GUI/simple way for users to set this. 


James

PS: When checking different languages, I noticed than NWAM is always in
English.