Creating a new locale on the OLPC

When you run the OLPC software you currently have access only to the English locales.

If you want to enable Greek support, you need to run (as root)

localedef -v -c -i /usr/share/i18n/locales/el_GR -f UTF-8 /usr/lib/locale/el_GR/

localedef -v -c -i /usr/share/i18n/locales/el_GR -f UTF-8 /usr/lib/locale/el_GR.utf8/

You will get a bunch of warnings. You can ignore them for now.

The localedef command compiles the source locale information found at /usr/share/i18n/locales/el_GR and places the resulting files at
/usr/lib/locale/el_GR/ and /usr/lib/locale/el_GR.utf8/ (both directories contain the same files, so you can also make a link from one to another). The reason we make two versions is that we can use either el_GR or el_GR.utf8 in the applications. Both use UTF-8 as the base encoding which is always nice.
For other locales, replace el_GR with the locale name of your country.

To activate the Greek locale, you need to create a file /etc/sysconfig/i18n and add the text

LANG=el_GR.utf8

LANGUAGE=el:en

Now you need to place the translated applications (.mo format) into

/usr/share/locale/el/LC_MESSAGES/

and restart your virtual machine (or laptop (hint hint)).

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/creating-a-new-locale-on-the-olpc/

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.