locales

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

Hi,

can someone explain to me what locales are for and how to set them?
I'm having some problems in openoffice which seem to be related to
locale issues...  there's a man entry for "setlocale", which I would
have thought to have been the right command, but debian doesn't find
the command when I lok for it (even as sudo).  in any case, I don't
really understnad the locale thing and would love to know more about
what its function is supposed to be.  thaqnksm uch,
matt