Chapter 2 System Environment

The Solaris 8 operating environment builds inherent internationalization features into every localized product. Sun's localization for the Korean Solaris 8 operating environment incorporates the following two essential environmental elements on top of internationalization:

• A locale includes specification of a language, territory, code set, and other features. The Korean Solaris operating environment includes three locales:

  • C - the ASCII English environment

  • ko - the Korean environment in EUC (KS C 5601)

  • ko.UTF-8- the Korean environment in Unicode 3.0

• A category--a set of language and cultural environment dependent features defined by ANSI C, whose behavior depends on the locale.

For example, the Korean locales and the English/ASCII locale each have a category that defines both the display of time and date according to the cultural format, as well as the actual Korean or English/ASCII characters for time and date.

The Korean Solaris operating environment localization facilities support the ANSI C recommendations for internationalization and localization. The ANSI C recommendations define a user's locale and the categories within each locale.

Setting Locale

Three components make up the Korean Solaris localization facility:

1. Localization Interface--User-level shell environment variables set the current working locale for each category. The application-level setlocale() function sets the locale for each category.

2. Localization Objects--These hold information suitable for functions that are specific to that locale.

3. Localization Support Features--These features include appropriate supporting commands and functions as well as facilities for creation, addition, and maintenance of localization objects.

The Korean Solaris 8 operating environment defines six categories to describe the local environment. These categories allow the localization of character typing and conversion functions, date and time, numeric representation, monetary format, collation order, and program messages. Each category can have multiple localizations. For example, time and date can be displayed in C locale format or Korean. Applications can switch between locale settings by using the setlocale() function.

Users can change their locale settings with shell environment variables. Each category names an existing locale. The setlocale function directly sets or queries the setting of these categories. Internationalized functions use these settings to access the appropriate tables for the desired locale.

Environment variables can be used to indirectly set the categories: when setlocale() sets the categories to the default setting for that application, it uses the setting of each environment variable to set the associated categories. setlocale() used in this way does not change the settings of environment variables, it only reads their settings.

Locale Categories

The Korean Solaris 8 operating environment allows you to set the Korean environment or use the English environment. You can specify the following:

• General locale setting--for all locale-related aspect of the environment.

• Specfic locale category settings--for particular aspects of the environment.

The general locale setting is LC_ALL. The specific local category settings are listed below. In this book, the designation LC_XXX refers to anuy of of the locale category settings.

• LC_CTYPE

• LC_TIME

• LC_NUMERIC

• LC_MONETARY

• LC_COLLATE

• LC_MESSAGES

The LC_ALL identifier invokes all six categories.

TTY Environment

The Korean Solaris 8 operating environment supports terminals using Combination code (KS C 5601-1992) and Completion code (KS C 5601-1987) . The terminals must have a method to input Korean characters, that is, run their own Hangul input conversion.

For information on using different types of terminals, refer to Korean Solaris System Administrator's Guide and Solaris Internationalization Guide for Develoeprs.