[arch-general] GDM is unable to choose language

[Rodrigo Rivas]

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 9:48 PM, Rodrigo Rivas
<rodrigorivascosta at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello, list!
>
> After the recent upgrade to GNOME 3.6 I've been having weird characters in
> the gnome-terminal. For example, if I run "pstree" the tree lines are all
> changed into ????.
>
> After some debugging I traced the problem to a bogus GDM_LANG value
> (en_GB.utf8) passed to the session launcher by GDM. The curious thing is
> that the GDM greeter doesn't show any control to choose the language...
> it's making it up! That locale doesn't even exist in my machine.
>
> Now, I can change the LANG variable back to a sane value in a
> "/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/01-fix-language" script, but that is just a hack.
>
> So, two questions remains:
>
> 1. Doesn't the GDM greeter have a language chooser any more?
> 2. From where is GDM reading the GDM_LANG value?
>

Well, about (2), GDM documentation says that the last LANGuage selected is
saved in $HOME/.dmrc. That used to be the case but it is no longer true.
Now it uses something named AccountService, which is a shiny dbus service
to get/set that kind of information. The data is saved in
/var/lib/AccountService/users/.$USER. I removed the line from that file, or
alternatively:

# sudo dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.Accounts --print-reply
/org/freedesktop/Accounts/User$UID
org.freedesktop.Accounts.User.SetLanguage string:

And solved.

Question (1) remains, still.

Regards.
--
Rodrigo