Legacy Language Options

The language selection menu in the login screen only shows the supported Unicode UTF-8 language names instead of locale names. To support the migration to Unicode, the Java Desktop System provides legacy locales using non-UTF-8 locales that system administrators can add to the login selection menu as an option.

The list of languages shown in the language selection menu in the login screen is configured in the following file: /etc/X11/gdm/locale.alias

Each supported legacy locale is listed in this file in a commented out line preceded by the # character. For example, Japanese support is listed in the following way:

To show ja_JP.eucJP as an option in the language selection menu, open the locale.alias file with a text editor and remove the # character at the start of the line.