Re: locales and coding systems
On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 01:19:17PM -0500, Haines Brown wrote:
> > > Suspecting locales needs a different version of glibc, and knowing
> > > that one can install multiple versions of glibc, I try:
> >
> > One cannot install multiple versions of glibc, at least not using the
> > Debian package management system.
>
> Aha! However, it's legit as far as linux is concerned, isn't it? I
> believe I've done this before successfully.
It's possible, but awkward, and there are lots of unexpected roadblocks.
> > What does 'dpkg -l libc6 locales' say?
>
> Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
> | Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
> |/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
> ||/ Name Version Description
> +++-==============-==============-============================================
> ii libc6 2.2.5-11.2 GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
> in locales <none> (no description available)
>
> Locales for stable depends on glibc-2.2.5-11.5. How I managed to end
> up with libc6-2.2.5-11.2 escapes me, but that's what I have.
Looks like you're missing security.debian.org from
/etc/apt/sources.list, I think. -11.2 was in stable or maybe
stable-proposed-updates at least until recently, while -11.5 is in
security.
> I may have messed things up when trying to install an untested
> application (Scribus) that may have required a newer version of
> libc6. When I get back to Scribus installation, I may be lucky and be
> able to create a symlink to 2.2.5-11.5 for it, but if that fails, I
> suppose I'll have to download and compile source for the newer libc6
> and use it in parallel with the 2.2.5-11.5 version.
It would be much easier to compile scribus from source so that it
depends on the older libc6. Dependencies on libc6 are usually a property
of the build, not of the source code.
Symlinks between different versions of libraries are generally not a
good plan.
> Sorry about the imaginary version number ;-). With the right name and
> number in hand, I just now successfully installed libc6-2.2.5-11.5,
> and then, not surprisingly, was able to install locales-2.2.5-11.5 as
> well.
Ah, excellent.
> I configured locales with en-US.utf-8, but when I next ran $ sudo
> locale, all I get for LANG is LANG=POSIX. I suspect I need to reboot
> for locale to be reset. In any case, the command $ sudo dpkg -l
> locales now reports that locales is installed.
>
> I assume I must reboot in order to test if enUS/utf-8 is now
> default.
No, you don't need to reboot; just log out and log back in.
(BTW, 'dpkg -l locales' doesn't need any special privileges, so you can
run it as an ordinary non-root user.)
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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