Fellow wretches,
I just wanted to try aforementioned piece of software, and we all
know what software means. So I start it, and it presents me with
a UI in German.
What.
Just how did it get this bright idea?
So I click around, looking for how to switch the language. I find
Tools --> Options
--> Under the Hood
--> Change font and language settings
--> Languages
where I can select what languages I want web pages to be in, and
what language the spell check should use.
No setting for the UI language.
So I hit Google. All I find is a Google help page telling me that
there should be a Google Chrome Language dropdown on the dialog
I've just looked at.
Huh? Did I miss it somehow?
Click, click, click, click, click, there I am... nope. No such
dropdown.
Back to Google. Forum posts, blog posts, screenshots, YouTube
videos... all taunting me with this one dropdown that I DON'T
HAVE. No other info. No one else is having the problem I have.
*headscratch*
So on a lark, I try `LANG=en google-chrome`. It throws an error
about how that is not a locale supported on my system and it's
falling back to `C`, and... shows me a UI in English.
A-huh.
I try `LANG=en_GB google-chrome`. Back to German.
Wait... suspicion. Can that really be it?
So I try `LC_CTYPE=en_GB google-chrome`... and lo, behold, it's
Chrome in English!
[ You see, the unusual thing is that I want my system pretty
much completely in English. However, since I live in Germany,
a lot of my data has umlauts and suchlike (we're all mëtäl
here you see), which should be treated properly as word
characters by tools, capitalised/lowercased properly, etc.
Lastly, I want purely ASCIIbetical sort order for stuff,
particularly because otherwise some non-word characters get
treated weirdly by GNU ls and cohorts. so my locale settings
are somewhat peculiar, and look like this:
LANG=en_GB.utf8
LC_CTYPE=de_DE.utf8
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_ALL=
Which is entirely fine, actually. It's an annoying pile of
"unbreak me" settings in my .bashrc, but we all know that's
just what software is like, right? Anyway... the upshot of
this is that the value of `LANG` becomes the default for all
other `LC_*` variables. ]
So it turns out that Google Chrome beta for Linux chooses to
IGNORE both `LANG` and the inheritance of that value to other
more appropriate variables such as `LC_MESSAGES`, and instead
seizes on `LC_CTYPE` as the basis for the language of its UI.
And does not let me change this from the GUI prefs.
*boggle*
Your fellow in hate,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
