HPUX 11.23 German

[antonio elder prado]

Hi,
I did order from HP a HPUX-11.23 and i requested to the OS to be in German. I received today a box with the DVDs that i mounted and seems to me that all the HPUX is in English, the only thing in German is the documentation. Do you know if actually there is an operating system in German, or no matter what locale you chose, the commands / shell/ all will be in English.
thank you,
./antonio/.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Having a shell in German (or Italian or Latin) makes no sense. The shell has no language; it only APPEARS to be English. What you are able to do is change the locale so that the output translates ASCII values into a particular character set, monetary values are displayed according to local rules, time and date are displayed according to local standards, etc. It is this locale that does adapt itself to a particular environment. In fact, a UNIX box might have users connected from all over the planet and beyond; each running his own environment with different locale settings. Man environ, locale for details.

The only computer language that does have non-english like keywords that I am familiar with is the French version of Pascal. In this case, each keywork (begin,end,while,repeat,until, ...) is replaced with its French equivalent.

The way to really think of the problem is to look at assembly language. Most of the instructions vaguely resemble English but imagine the confusion if those instruction mnemonics were replaced by other instructions which vaguely resembled another human language. It would be difficult in the extreme to debug someone else's code. I would much rather have "xor" mean the same thing to everyone on the planet. Higher level languages (including the shell) are no exception. If this is truly a big deal to you then it would be rather simple to craft a script which would first do a token for token replacement of a script before actually sending it to the shell (or Perl or awk or ...) for actual execution ---- just don't ask anyone to debug your source code.

[antonio elder prado]

Stephenson,

thank you very much for your reply. The reason for this is that i have some applications that are in German and for German users, and i thought that having the hpux being in German would make it easier.
I appreciate your examples.

thank you again,

./antonio/.

[Dennis Handly]

>i thought that having the hp-ux being in German would make it easier.

Are you talking about making it easier for the end-users, operators or sysadmins?

From Clay's comment about locales, here are what I have:
de_DE.iso88591
de_DE.iso885915@euro
de_DE.roman8
de_DE.utf8

So you would want to have each German user do the following in his .profile:
export LANG=de_DE.iso88591

If everyone is German, you can set it globally in /etc/profile.

[antonio elder prado]

Handly,

it would make it easy to the users, whenever the app does something like swapinfo, or bdf, or uptime, i believed it would have something in German for these command. (my mistake).
I will suggest to our users to change tne .profile.
thank you for your help,

./antonio/.

[Dennis Handly]

>whenever the app does something like swapinfo, or bdf, or uptime, i believed it would have something in German for these command.

It appears only the "big ticket" commands have their own German message catalog.

You can check by looking at directories like /usr/lib/nls/msg/de_DE.iso88591/

So at, awk, cat ... have German message catalogs.

To see the contents you can use dumpmsg(1).

[Torsten.]

"having the hpux being in German would make it easier"

IMHO, it will be much more difficult.
You will see messages like never before and you won't understand them, because you'll miss the sense.

For example the user "root" is sometimes called "Systemverwalter" or what ever. "root privileges" is sometimes called "Systemverwalterberechtigung" ... in addition to this you will see german umlauts - try to handle this in a script!

If you try to find any similar message in the internet you will be lost ... you won't find anything useful.

[Anshumali]

IMHO....your users are pleased with the MSFT's offering of its OS in International languages. They might be finding using Windows in German easier than using it in English.
May be a good thing to notice for HP-UX as well for different GUI's....
What about running a ported version of GNOME or KDE with localized language....may be better to some extent for your users if they are Gui based.( Never Tried it)

Thanks,
Anshu

[antonio elder prado]

Thank you all for your time and suggestions.
./antonio/.