Nice multilingual environment with Debian menu

[Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org>]

Hi,

We all know how to set up localized environment through shell
environment variables.  There is even helper packages language-env.
(Or KDE etc can be started with locale set by kdm.)

But I never liked them since I get locked into a single locale.

So how can we elegantly set multilingual environment in X window
environment with direct access to the different language environments.

My wishlists are:
  * UTF-8 console with English locale
  * UTF-8 console with Japanese locale
  * en_US.ISO-8859-1 console
  * fr_FR.ISO-8859-1 console
  * de_DE.ISO-8859-1 console
  * mozilla at the top of initial menu selection

It may have been known for many but I just found that the customized
Debian menu is the most elegant way to do this :-)

(I used to have shell start-up script asking locale.)

Long answer is here:
  http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/ch-tune.en.html#s-x-cjk

Key tricks used are:
 1. creating customized menu entry by adding files in /etc/menu,
 2. command are executed under "sh -c" to enable new environment,
 3. menu entry such as "/" " ..." to get to the nicer location.

Osamu

PS: per user based ~/.menu entry never worked for me.