I selected the "Use UNICODE by default" during the installation, now how can I disable it?

why would you want to do that?

My question exactly .

Cuz I am a Chinese user. And the locale is really annoying: in some applications, I have to set the locale to non-unicode to display Chinese, in others I have to set it to Unicode to display Chinese characters correctly. And the Chinese input method only works in Unicode mode if you install it in Unicode mode, bla, bla, bla.................

Anyway, I don't know what is exactly going on so if I can just disable the Unicode, at least I can try something out.

The Linux internationalization and localization is really frustrating. If somebody can point me to some documentation links, I really appreciate that.

Well, since according to the HTML version of the PDF Mandrake (9.1) Quickstart Guide (unlikely that the version should matter much, although you haven't said which version of Mandrake you're using) says that:

I would guess that if you were to run localedrake from either the MCC or from the command line, you could turn the "Use Unicode by default" setting off.

I wonder, though, how are you changing locales, and what DE are you using? I'm not sure that this is necessarily a Mandrake issue, but instead might be (for example) a KDE issue.

Hope this helps, though.

yes indeed, something I've learnt since using slack is that everything isn't as integrated as it looks with mandrake. Maybe it isn't a bad idea to check out the KDE control center if your using KDE and check if your environment variables are set right if you are using GNOME (don't remember which though). Usually I set the environment variables at the end of /etc/profile. This way it is right for all the users...

Mandrake (and other distros, like RedHat and SuSE) do a lot of work on the backend to "integrate" the DEs with their distros.

But it seems pretty much impossible to really "integrate" KDE (which is awful monolithic in a lot of ways) with custom distro tools, and so distros like Slack tend to work a bit better because they don't even try (you use KDE tools when using KDE, and don't have to worry about custom tools).

The thing is, I don't use KDE much, but I do use another language sometimes (my native language is English, but I live in The Netherlands, so I sometimes try to improve my Dutch by running my DE in Dutch, to learn specific computer terms). Of course, Dutch is also a Western (Latin-1) language, like English, and not an Asian language, but still, some of my experiences with changing languages reflects yours, which is why I bring up the DE issue.

I usually change languages at login, because I use GDM, which provides this functionality (don't know if KDM, XDM or MDKDM do as well).

So this one time I logged into KDE in Dutch. That was fine, as I believe that all DE's (at least KDE and GNOME) use the LANG= environment variable at startup, which is presumably set when I chose the alternate language from the GDM menu.

However, I needed to use the KDE Help Center, and to be honest, I couldn't read it (my Dutch is good, but not all that good, and it was a lot of text). So I changed the language in the KDE Control Center, and this also worked partially (despite the advisory that the language won't be changed until you log out and back in). But then I had some stuff in English and some stuff in Dutch (which was to be expected imo, so wasn't a problem for me, but certainly could be under other circumstances).

So that's why I ask; this sounds very much like you either don't have a Chinese UTF-8 locale installed, as discussed in A Quick Primer On Unicode and Software Internationalization Under Linux and UNIX, or you do, but you're changing locales in such a way that it's not being loaded properly, or the programs you're using don't support Unicode in any case.

So running localedrake seems like the best idea anyway, just to see what's going on (Mandrake installs a lot of locales, so if a Chinese UTF-8 locale exists, it might well be installed, but you might not have chosen it, just like I often forget to choose "iso8859-15 for my character/font set, so that I get the Euro symbol, as the default iso8859-1 for US English does not contain it, and, living in Europe, I need it).

Hope this helps.

Hi Welson-sun,

You can set up alternate users with different locale settings, so you can log in as normal in your default Unicode locale user, and then run an app that requires GB3212 encoding from a Konsole terminal window. That user would have to have the LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL settings specified as zh_CN in that user's .bashrc file. XMODIFIER would have to be specified as that encoding's most appropriate input method (xcin, chinput, fcitx, scim etc. whatever you prefer)

Search LQ for "chinese input", we've gone over these issues many times before and there are detailed instructions in many previous postings...

if the above doesn't make sense, i'll try to explain in more detail.

good luck!

jdw

Thanks for all the help. Currently I don't have any problems using my MDK. Here is the summary of my situation:
1. I used expert mode for installing MDK10. For the language selection, I chose English and Simplified Chinese, and I also checked the "Use Unicode as default" checkbox.
2. If you do not do any modification to the system, after you login, you will get the locale info based on the language selection in the login screen. If you choose English, it will be en_US.UTF-8, if you select Simplified Chinese, it will be zh_CN.UTF-8.
3. I installed SCIM under the locale zh_CN.UTF-8.
4. I have to set the LANG to zh_CN.UTF-8 to invoke the SCIM for GAIM.
5. I have to set the LANG to zh_CN to see the Chinese in XMMS, the original Chinese is in GB2312 encoding, so I guess UTF-8 is not compatable with GB2312. I do this by setting the LANG variable first in terminal and invoke XMMS in that terminal.
6. I have to set the LANG to zh_CN to see the Chinese in GFTP, maybe the ftp server use GB2312 also for Chinese. That would be the same as 5.
7. If I set LANG to zh_CN, and then start Mozilla from the terminal, the SCIM will not be invoked inside Mozilla, maybe because I installed SCIM in zh_CN.UTF-8. I have to set the LANG to zh_CN.UTF-8 to make SCIM work under Mozilla.
8. If I do not choose "Use Unicode by default", the locale will not end up with UTF-8. Maybe I should do that to simplify things.
9. I tried to modify the i18n file in /etc to change the system wide locale information, but that does not help. Now I am doing in /etc/gnome/gnomerc which I don't think is a good place. I am using TCSH, so maybe the .cshrc will be a good place? But this is user specific, not system wide.

Anyway, thanks for the messages and links, I will look into that and after I totally understand what is going on with the Internationalization and Localization, I will propably write an article to clarify it and avoid future silly questions like what I asked at the top floor. :-)