How can I force codepage/locale (different from my Linux system locale) for non-Unicode Wine applications?

Question

I prefer using English locales for my system, but have to use some old Unicode-unaware Russian and Czech applications. In Windows I could set a locale for such applications in a separate Control Panel place. How can I configure this in Linux/Wine?

Answer 1

The idea is to set LANG only for this application.

If you start the application from the command line, write something like alias yourapp="export LANG=ru_RU.utf8 /usr/bin/yourapp" in ~/.bashrc.

If you start the application with a GUI button, you can edit the corresponding desktop file, i.e. open ~/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers/yourapp.desktop in a text editor and change the line Exec=/usr/bin/yourapp %F to Exec=sh -c "LANG=ru_RU.utf8 /usr/bin/foo %F"

Answer 2

Did you try setting LANG variable? I don't know the Czech setting, Russian should be ru_RU.utf8 at least that's what I'd use.

See what your current locale settings are:

% locale
LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=

If your locales are installed correctly, setting LANG should set all other variables. I cannot guarantee, that this will work in conjunction with WINE, though.