Locales and Translations

glibc supports setting the system locale whereas musl does not; both support setting the language for applications.

Listing locales

For a list of currently enabled locales, run:

$ locale -a

Enabling locales

To enable a certain locale, un-comment or add the relevant lines in /etc/default/libc-locales and force-reconfigure the glibc-locales package.

Setting the system language

Set LANG=xxxx in /etc/locale.conf.

Application locale

Some programs have their translations in a separate package that must be installed in order to use them. You can search for the desired language (e.g. "german" or "portuguese") in the package repositories and install the packages relevant to the applications you use. An especially relevant case is when installing individual packages from the LibreOffice suite, such as libreoffice-writer, which require installing at least one of the libreoffice-i18n-* packages to work properly. This isn't necessary when installing the libreoffice meta-package, since doing so will install the most common translation packages.