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How to install and change locale in Solaris 11

Published 21 Mar 2016 | 2 minute read | 1717 views | Solaris

In the default installation of Oracle Solaris 11, ten core locales are available. In this article I describe how to use pkg utility to add support for additional languages.

The following table lists Oracle Solaris 11 core locales:

Table 1 — Languages and Core locales
Language	Core locale
Chinese - Simplified	zh_CN.UTF-8
Chinese - Traditional	zh_TW.UTF-8
English	en_US.UTF-8
French	fr_FR.UTF-8
German	de_DE.UTF-8
Italian	it_IT.UTF-8
Japanese	ja_JP.UTF-8
Korean	ko_KR.UTF-8
Portuguese - Brazilian	pt_BR.UTF-8
Spanish	es_ES.UTF-8

To add language support, we set the pertinent locale facet with the pkg change-facet command. For example, you can use the following command to install and add support for English as spoken in the United Kingdom.

To install files common for locales specific to English in the United Kingdom:
```
# pkg change-facet locale.en_GB=True
```
To install files common for all English locales and all of the English variants:
```
# pkg change-facet locale.en_*=True
```

To remove locales, specify False or None instead of True.

False — explicitly deselects applicable files.
None removes the specific locale configuration and causes applicable files to get deselected implicitly because locale.*=False is configured in default installations.

To confirm the locale has been installed, we can issues the locale command. For example:

# locale -a | grep en_
en_GB.ISO8859-1
en_GB.ISO8859-15
en_GB.UTF-8
en_US.ISO8859-1
en_US.ISO8859-15
en_US.UTF-8

To set the the default system local to be en_GB, we can execute the following commands:

# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init setprop environment/LC_ALL = astring: "en_GB.UTF.8"
# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init setprop environment/LC_COLLATE = astring: "en_GB.UTF.8"
# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init setprop environment/LC_CTYPE = astring: "en_GB.UTF.8"
# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init setprop environment/LC_NUMERIC = astring: "en_GB.UTF.8"
# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init setprop environment/LC_TIME = astring: "en_GB.UTF.8"
# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init setprop environment/LC_MONETARY = astring: "en_GB.UTF.8"
# svcadm refresh svc:/system/environment

To list the information changed, we can execute the following:

# svccfg -s svc:/system/environment:init
svc:/system/environment:init> listprop
umask                            application
umask/umask                      astring     022
umask/value_authorization        astring     solaris.smf.value.environment
environment                      application
environment/TZ                   astring     localtime
environment/value_authorization  astring     solaris.smf.value.environment
environment/LC_CTYPE             astring     en_GB.UTF8
environment/LC_COLLATE           astring     en_GB.UTF8
environment/LC_MESSAGES          astring     C
environment/LC_MONETARY          astring     en_GB.UTF8
environment/LC_NUMERIC           astring     en_GB.UTF8
environment/LC_TIME              astring     en_GB.UTF8
environment/LC_ALL               astring
environment/LC_LANG              astring
environment/LANG                 astring
startd                           framework
startd/duration                  astring     transient
general                          framework
general/action_authorization     astring     solaris.smf.manage.environment
general/complete                 astring
general/enabled                  boolean     true
sysconfig                        sysconfig
sysconfig/config_properties      astring     "sc_all:environment/LC_ALL" "sc_lang:environment/LANG" "sc_ctype:environment/LC_CTYPE" "sc_numeric:environment/LC_NUMERIC" "sc_time:environment/LC_TIME" "sc_collate:environment/LC_COLLATE" "sc_monetary:environment/LC_MONETARY" "sc_messages:environment/LC_MESSAGES" "sc_tz:environment/TZ"
sysconfig/group                  astring     location
sysconfig/reconfigurable         boolean     false
sysconfig/value_authorization    astring     solaris.smf.value.environment

Optional, reboot the server

# init 6