[BlueOnyx:11303] Re: Problem setting 5107R to german

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Christoph,

> I have just finished setting up a 5107R in a OpenVZ VPS and the first
> thing the customer did is switching to german GUI language.
> After this all GUI msgs went untranslated and showed up raw. A reboot or 
> cced restart didn't fix it. Also the language selection was empty so it 
> was impossible to set it back to english which worked.
> 
> I did make the following observations:
> 
> - Setting the language to german edits /etc/sysconfig/i18n from:
> LANG=en_US
> LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
> LINGUAS="en_US da_DK de_DE ja_JP"
> 
> to:
> LANG=de_DE
> LC_ALL=de_DE
> LINGUAS="en_US da_DK de_DE ja_JP"
> 
> After a reboot or cced restart, the file looks like:
> 
> LANG=de_DE
> LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
> LINGUAS="en_US da_DK de_DE ja_JP"
> 
> In all cases the menus show untranslated/raw msg strings.

Is this an OpenVZ template I did (i.e.: from www.blueonyx.it or
updates.aventurin.net?)

Or did you fetch an OpenVZ OS template from somewhere else and then
installed BlueOnyx on it?

On a BlueOnyx 5107R or 5108R your /etc/sysconfig/i18n will look like
this if you switch the GUI to German for user "admin":

[root at 5108r]# cat /etc/sysconfig/i18n
LANG=de_DE
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LINGUAS="en_US da_DK de_DE ja_JP"

That is really all that's needed to do.

However, some of the "precreated" OS templates from openvz.org "cheat".
In order to create a really small tarball, they strip the RPM
"glibc-common" down and remove all foreign language support but the one
English. They do this to conserve space and to create a really small OS
template.

When you then try to switch the OS to a different language but English,
then you will get really unpredictable results as the ones you're seeing
there. Without a complete "glibc-common" the translation will not work
for anything but English.

How to check:

rpm -V glibc-common

This should report if files are missing from that RPM.

rpm -q --info glibc-common

That should show the RPM header.

On an SL-6.3 with BlueOnyx 5107R it reads like this:

[root at 5107r 5.3.16-SOL1]# rpm -q --info glibc-common
Name        : glibc-common                 Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 2.12                              Vendor: Scientific Linux
Release     : 1.80.el6_3.5                  Build Date: Mo 27 Aug 2012
16:55:12 CEST
Install Date: Di 28 Aug 2012 06:02:36 CEST      Build Host: sl6.fnal.gov
Group       : System Environment/Base       Source RPM:
glibc-2.12-1.80.el6_3.5.src.rpm
Size        : 112279494                        License: LGPLv2+ and
LGPLv2+ with exceptions and GPLv2+
Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Mo 27 Aug 2012 17:53:05 CEST, Key ID
b0b4183f192a7d7d
Packager    : Scientific Linux
URL         : http://sources.redhat.com/glibc/
Summary     : Common binaries and locale data for glibc
Description :
The glibc-common package includes common binaries for the GNU libc
libraries, as well as national language (locale) support.

Check the "Vendor" and "Build Host" field to see if yours was built on
something else than what you'd expect for your distribution.

I have seen "precreated" OS templates from openvz.org which had the
original "glibc-common", but which had manually removed the other
locales, but I have also seen OS templates with a custom "glibc-common"
RPM which was missing the locales to begin with.

The obvious fix for this situation is to replace your glibc-common with
the one that would usually be installed on your OS. So you'd have to get
it via YUM or by manually downloading and installing it with the RPM
command.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber