9.7.14 Beyond locales

When you are first setting the system up for a national language environment, please consider using tasksel or aptitude to find out what packages are selected by choosing the corresponding language environment task. The package choice made is useful even for a multilingual setup. If you encounter any package dependency conflicts during the install to your carefully configured system, avoid installing any software that conflicts with the existing system. You may have to use update-alternative to regain the original state for some commands since a newly installed one may have higher priority than existing ones.

Newer major programs are using glibc 2.2 and are mostly internationalized. So a specially localized version such as jvim for Vim may not be needed as its functionality is offered by vim version 6.0 in X. In reality, it is still somewhat rough-edged. Since jvim has a version compiled with direct Japanese input method (canna) support even in the console and addresses many other Japanese-specific issues maturely, you may still want it :-)

Programs may need to be configured beyond locale configuration to enable a comfortable working environment. The language-env package and its command set-language-env greatly eases this process.

Also see the internationalization document, Introduction to i18n. It is aimed at developers but is also useful for system administrators.