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length. This allows encoding all Unicode characters on a sequence of one or
more octets.
Applications have slowly migrated, and use of UTF-8 is now wide spread. This
was made easier by the fact that this encoding is the standard encoding for
XML documents. Outside of specific circumstances, this is the encoding that
should generally be used. It has become the default on new installations since
Etch.
The locales package includes all the elements required for proper functioning of “localization”
for various applications. During installation, this package will ask a few questions in order to
choose supported languages. This set of supported languages can be changed by running dpkgreconfigure
locales.
You will be asked, first, to choose what “locales” to include. Selecting all English locales (meaning
those beginning with“en_US”) is a reasonable choice. Do not hesitate to choose other locales
if the machine will host foreign users. This list of known locales on the system is stored
in the /etc/locale.gen file. It is possible to edit this file by hand, but you should run localegen
after any modifications. It will generate the necessary files for the proper functioning of
added locales and remove any obsolete files.
The second question, entitled “Set default locale”, requests a default locale. The recommended
choice in the U.S.A. is “en_US.UTF-8”. British English speakers will prefer “en_GB.
UTF-8”, and Canadians will prefer either en_CA.UTF-8” or, for French, “fr_CA.UTF-8”. The
/etc/default/locale file will then be modified to set the default locale for the environment
variable, LANG.
BEHIND THE SCENES
/etc/environment and /etc/
default/locale
The /etc/environment file provides the login, gdm, or even ssh programs with
the correct environment variables to be created.
These applications do not create these variables directly, but rather via a PAM
(pam_env.so) module. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) is a modular
library centralizing the mechanisms for authentication, session initialization,
and password management. See Section 11.7.3.2, “Configuring PAM” (page
292) for an example of PAM configuration.
The /etc/default/locale file works in a similar manner, but does not contain
the LANG environment variable. This means some PAM users will inherit
an environment without localization. Running server programs with regional
parameters is generally discouraged; on the other hand, using the implicit
regional seings is recommended for programs that open user sessions.
8.1.2. Configuring the Keyboard
Until Debian Lenny, the keyboard layout was controlled by two different systems: for the console,
console-tools/console-data; for graphical environments, keyboard-configuration. Since Squeeze,
these two systems have been unified and keyboard-configuration controls the keyboard layout in
both console and graphical mode. The dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration command
can be used at any time to reset the keyboard layout.
Chapter 8 — Basic Configuration: Network, Accounts, Printing…
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