Re: locales and coding systems

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

I find that when I try to save a file in emacs that contains an
accented character, I get "No default coding system to try."
Apparently this is why (for some reason) it "suggests" using
utf-16-le. 

Vineet,

Your message was very helpful, for it suggests the above problem may
be due to no character set being defined for debian, and to look more
closely at locales. 

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
... locales not fully installed

This may explain why the return from a # locales command does not
include a character set. So it seems I must reinstall locales to
define a character set (en_US.UTF-8, for ex.).

$ sudo aptitude install locales
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages
E: Unable to correct dependencies, some packages cannot be installed
E: Unable to resolve some dependencies!
The following packages have unmet dependencies
locals: Depends: glibc-2.2.5-11.5 which is a virtual package

I'm new to debian and so naturally this not entirely clear. What does
"held" and "broken" mean? What is a "virtual package"? When I run #
ldd locales, no executable is listed. Should it be?

Suspecting locales needs a different version of glibc, and knowing
that one can install multiple versions of glibc, I try:

$ sudo aptitude install glibc=2.2.5
...
Unable to find version "2.2.5" for the package "glibc" 

I can't find glibc at all in /lib, and fear the impossible: I simply
don't have glibc. So run:

$ sudo aptitude install glibc
...
The following packages have been held back: libc6

Again, what does "held back" mean here? I've got libc-2.2.5, but can't
find libc6. I fear my continuing to flounder about like this will do
some irreparable damage. 

Sorry for these naive questions.

Haines Brown