I don't know what exactly causes your problems, but
setting LANG=ISO-8859-1 is wrong. ISO-8859-1 isn't language,
it's a character set.

I believe is that you want the environment configured as follows:

export LANG=fr
export LC_ALL=fr_FR.ISO8859-1

Jaromir

cube wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm having trouble setting up a correct desktop with my 1.6E system.
> 
> It seems like GTK applications cannot handle the LANG parameter. For some
> reason (a bad configuration file, seemingly), gdm associates ISO-8859-1
> with language French, although it should be ISO8859-1. So when I start a
> GNOME session, I get stuck with LANG set to fr_FR.ISO-8859-1 (even if I
> export it otherwise in my .xsession).
> 
> With this setting, applications complain that the locale is not supported
> by the C library, which seems perfectly normal, since the correct locale
> would be fr_FR.ISO8859-1. But anyway French locales are loaded, but every
> single string displayed by a GTK widget get truncated everywhere an
> accentued letter (or any non-ASCII character) is encountered.
> 
> When I launch an application from a terminal with the correct LANG
> setting, strings containing a non ASCII character get simply voided.
> 
> I thought this was a (not so) quite simple matter of how GTK+ and Glib are
> compiled, and that maybe something was missing at configuration time for
> those packages.
> 
> But things got weirder when I started gnometoaster to burn a cd. I started
> it as root for obvious reasons. You couldn't imagine my surprise when I
> realized strings were displayed correctly by GTK, with both settings for
> LANG.
> 
> To get finer results, I started Galeon as root. The first-time-wizard
> appeared quite weird. With LANG=ISO-8859-1, I get the usual warnings about
> the locale in the terminal, but labels of options and other components of
> the different dialog boxes are displayed correctly. But the title of the
> pages get truncated at the first accentued letter.
> 
> Here is a screenshot of such a page, for those of you not using Galeon :
> http://galeon.sourceforge.net/graphics/shots/druid/shot3.png
> 
> The title of the page is the white string at the top.
> 
> With LANG=ISO8859-1, still as root, I get exactly the opposite. The white
> titles get displayed properly, but the labels of the widgets are voided
> when they contain an accentued letter. Note that it is not the case with
> gnometoaster.
> 
> So my question is, how do I get a correct display for a normal user, with
> the correct locale ?
> 
> Thank you in advance for any help. Truncated strings are bearable, but I
> like to understand why things don't go as they should.
> 
> cube
> 
> -- 
> That's how I did it, Anton. I never saved anything
> for the swim back.
> Vincent/Jerome, in Gattaca.
> 


-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>            http://www.NetBSD.org/
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-=- Buddhist masters say, ``You may notice during meditation that you -=-
-=- sometimes levitate or glow.   Do not let this distract you.''     -=-