Localizing Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a Debian based Linux distribution. In its few years of existence it made quite an impression by its support and speed of development. If offers the advantage to Debian in the way it supports the modern and rare hardware. I had no problem installing it on a new Dell right out of the box. I use the server version of Dapper Drake 6.06 on my PHP server. Once you have installed the OS, you can run into problems localizing your system. I wanted to have Dutch dates on my Dutch website and English dates on my international sites. The way to add support for different languages differs quite a bit from earlier Ubuntu versions, because ‘dpkg-reconfigure locales’ doesn’t work. But once you know the secret is not difficult at all.
So here we go:
Open this file:
vi /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
Look for the supported localizations, and add your choices to
vi */*/locales/supported.d/local
Save the file and rebuild locales:
dpkg-reconfigure locales
Finally we have to restart apache to take the changes into effect:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
That’s all. It should work now!