How to Make OpenOffice.org Start with UK English Language en_GB Selected
By David Legg, 2007.
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Most UK users of Linux and openoffice.org will download the US version and install it.
This has the irritating side effect that the default language is set up to be American
instead of English, i.e. en_US instead of en_GB.
This means that youhave to go into Tools->Options->Language Settings->Languages in openoffice and change
the default language from English (USA) (i.e. American) to English (UK).
A better way, is to add the following line to certain text files that get executed when openoffice.org is started.
export LANG=en_GB
This can be added to this file:
/usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice
You will need to 'su -' or use sudo or whatever to edit this file as root.
If this doesn't work for you, other places to consider adding the line to these files:
/usr/bin/openoffice.org-2.0
/usr/bin/ooffice
/usr/lib64/openoffice.org/program/soffice
So, for example, /usr/bin/ooffice would look like this after editing:
#!/bin/sh
export LANG=en_GB
exec /usr/lib/openoffice.org2.0/program/soffice "$@"
This works on Fedora Core 5 and FC6, but please email me at dwlegg a t gmail d o t com if you
can confirm that this works with other distros, or doesn't etc etc.
Note that you might find that updates to openoffice.org overwrite this modification, so you
could have to re-edit the relevant files.
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