Hi there,

I am observing a minor cosmetic problem in my system in KMail: While the whole GUI appears in my language (German) according to system settings, the weekdays in the message list pane appear in English.

When I start KMail from Konsole or xterm after issuing
the weekdays appear in German language, too.

I am starting KDE from a console (runlevel 3) with
My locale in the console is:
But in KDE, as I said, everything is set to local settings.

KMail seems not to obey to the KDE system settings completely, but to rely on the console locale in some parts. This is a bit confusing and a little inconsistent.

Is there an easy way, to get German (or more general: localised) weekdays, without having to set the (non-DE) console locale to German (or whatever your language is)?

Of course, I could tweak .xinitrc or .xsession (I always confuse the two, only one is relevant for KDE, to my knowledge, but I never now, which one). But KDE is for end-users, not only for geeks and gurus. Therefore I think there must be another solution, because end-users (familiar with Windoze and such) will not accept a desktop enviroment that forces them to edit text files before they can use it in their own language. And I'd be very surprised, if the KDE developers would have ignored this fact. Therefore I am convinced, that there is another way to solve this.

Thanks!

gargamel

Thanks in advance!

gargamel

Not sure I understand your question but this how I do it:
- edit /etc/profile.d/ to include:
- installpkg kde-I10n-fr-4.2.4-noarch-1.txz
- in KDE configuration choose French as language

Weekdays appear in French in kmail, no matter how/from where I launch it.

HTH,

Yes, thanks, I know. By setting the locale explicitly it is possible to get the weekdays in the corresponding language. But actually I'd prefer to have KMail obey to the KDE system settings. And in fact, it does, to a large extent.

The regional settings in KDE are German, and KMail uses these settings. The whole GUI and all the messages appear in German language. Just not the weekdays. They appear in English, which is my locale setting for the console (/etc/profile.d/lang.sh and /etc/profile.d/csh).

This behavious is inconsistent, and makes no sense to me. Because: With the settings in /etc/profile.d/lang.(c)sh you define a system-wide default. If I set it to French, as in your example, the weekdays appear in French, while everything else appears in German.

So why does KMail use the system locale for weekdays, while it uses the KDE settings for everything else?

gargamel


EDIT: Just wanted to add a brief explanation, why I think, the behaviour of KDE is wrong: I want to have the default locale, just with support for international characters (UTF-8 in this case), for the system administrator. But then, every non-privileged user should be able to customise his KDE to its likings, including their preferred language, independently of the system locale.
This was the behaviour in earlier KDE releases, and I think it was correct. As I said, not a big thing, though, just a little irritating.

Ok, as noone else replies, I guess I was talking in riddles.
I'll try to explain it more clearly.


ENVIRONMENT
My system locale set in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh and /etc/profile.d/lang.csh is en_US.UTF-8. I need the UTF-8 support, but want to have manpages in the default language on the CLI.
My KDE system settings are localised. I have German keyboard, German language, and Euro as currency.

EFFECT
All KDE applications have localised (German) GUIs, including KMail. With one little exception: In the message list pane, email messages are grouped according to the day they arrived. The most recent emails are grouped as "Today" or "Yesterday". These groups also appear in German language in my KMail: "Today" is "Heute", and "Yesterday" appears as "Gestern". However, email that date back a few days are grouped by the name of weekdays or calendar months. And these are NOT translated for some reason, I don't understand. "Monday" always appears as "Monday", not as "Montag", and "March" is not translated to "März".

KMAIL USES A MIX OF KDE AND SYSTEM LOCALE SETTINGS
Now, if I set the system locale to German, i. e. de_DE.UTF-8 in /etc/profile.d/lang.*, these names appear in German, too. But then I also have German error messages, German man pages and so on, on the CLI, too, which I don't want.

Obviously, KMail uses KDE settings for most things, but relies on the system locale for parts of the message list grouping. This is, IMHO, an inconsistent behaviour. My question is: Is it a Slackware or a KDE 4.2.4 issue?

In the latter case: Does anyone know, if it is fixed in KDE 4.3? I would report a bug to the KDE team, but only, if it is not fixed, yet, and if it is really a KDE issue.

Does anyone know?

Thanks

gargamel

Upgraded to -current and KDE 4.3.2. Problem gone!

gargamel