Internet Services from KKoncepts

Living in Asia means lots of character sets to deal with - Roman script, Chinese characters (Simplified and Traditional), Thai, Vietnamese, <your script here>. One day everyone will use Unicode and this won't be an issue. But today I still get support calls asking why the webmail system doesn't properly display a certain script. The answer is usually because I haven't enabled that "locale".

On debian, enabling another locale is dead easy. Just run dpkg-reconfigure locales Choose the locales you want to enable and press 'OK'. That's all there is.

On Ubuntu, however, it's still a bit more manual process. First you either need to edit the file "/var/lib/locales/supported.d/local" or create a new file in that same directory. Since I'm going to enable Thai, I'll add a new file called "th". ("th" being the country abbreviation code for Thailand.)

Since I have no clue what the locale settings are for Thai scripts, I need to do a little googling. Turns out there are two of them, the old, non-Unicode locale and the newer UTF-8 locale. I'll add them both to cover all the bases.

So I create a new file called "/var/lib/locales/supported.d/th" and into it I put the two lines for the two new locales I want to add.th_TH TIS-620
th_TH.UTF-8 UTF-8

Then we run "dpkg-reconfigure locales" and it picks up the new settings and creates the locale files. And now Thai should be displayed correctly. (Assuming, of course, you have the proper font on your computer. But that's another story.)