Debian Chinese Locale Howto


1.
Choose Chinese (ÖÐÎÄ) language to proceed with the installation.

Do choose Chinese at this time. You can still read menu in English in desktop environment, and command line feedback in English on PuTTY ssh client.

2.
Add en_US.UTF-8, but keep None as the default for the next question.
$ su -c 'dpkg-reconfigure locales'

3.
To make sure you see command line feedback in English when you ssh with PuTTY. Add this line in ~/.bashrc:
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

4.
Choose English at the GNOME desktop login window for the English menu etc.

(5. TODO: Haven't tried it with VNC yet)


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Demo:

$ ssh 192.168.0.150
tom@192.168.0.150's password:
$ su
ÃÜÂ룺
su£º¼ø¶¨¹ÊÕÏ
$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
POSIX
zh_CN.utf8
$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=zh_CN:zh
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$
$ vi ~/.bashrc
$ grep LANGUAGE ~/.bashrc
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
$
$ exit
logout
Connection to 192.168.0.150 closed.
$
$ ssh 192.168.0.150
tom@192.168.0.150's password:
$ su
Password:
su: Authentication failure
$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
$ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
POSIX
zh_CN.utf8
$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$