I switched my local setting from USA and American English to an other country and language. All the native KDE apps are in the new language. But other apps are not. I know that GIMP, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC and Clementine have desired language versions, but they are still in English.
Clementine has been set to use the system language (you can set any language from a drop-down list), so I assume all the changes I made affect only my user account, but the system’s global language still is set to US English.
Oh, and the path to default directories (Documents, Music etc.) did not changed too and stayed in English.
Thanks roadrunner! Got it.
So you have to find the file /etc/default/locale which has just one line and change it to e.g.:
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
if you want German, or fr_FR.UTF-8 if you want French or en_GB.UTF-8 if you want British English etc. You may use nano: # sudo nano /etc/default/locale
Save and reboot. Done!
On my other computer I picked my native language when I was installing Netrunner, so I didn’t have this problems later. But on my desktop I installed Netrunner using distros default language (which is US English) and tried to switch to the other language later.
One thing bothers me… If an another user will try to set English as his language, then he/she will get all the non-KDE apps in the language I just set as the default in /etc/default/locale, right?
If it’s of any interest, the same problem with locales exists with Fedora 17(KDE). If you change the locale in the KDE System Settings, it doesn’t get changed system-wide.
roadrunner:
The problem rather seems to be why do the non-KDE apps use the system-wide configuration file instead of the user-specified locales? Dates, currency, time zone, decimal spacing worked fine, Dolphin, Rekonq, System Settings etc. were translated.
I can imagine a Japanese university using Japanese in the system-wide settings and time to time having a non-Japanese speaking visiting stuff. GIMP in an alphabet you don’t know? Good luck
