Waqas’s Blog

this post is just for a reminder for me . Now OLPC build contains sugar-control-panel so changing locale from that is very easy! just a simple command and walla! the locale is changed.

how? here it is … $ sugar-control-panel -s language Urdu/Pakistan

simple aint it .. but why i am writing it because i have to experiment with a historic build and its useful for Fedora as well

$ cd /etc/sysconfig/
$ vi i18n
add LANG= “ur_PK.UTF-8″

and then restart X or restart you machine ( for fedora/olpc Users )
and if you are using my Favourite Ubuntu and want to change to locale of the machine then its simple just edit
$ vi /etc/environment
add LANG= “ur_PK.UTF-8″
and restart X or machine and there you go then locale or orientation of you desktop is in urdu i.e. right hand side writting scheme.

soon ill be writing more about localization issues from PO files to MO and from Keyboard configuration to Font installation

walla i’ve learned bash. i am not a pro coder in bash right now but now i can under stand bash really well. Here is an interesting thing i found or you can say that the thing most bugged me when i was writing bash scripts were how to count the resulting string characters, and also how to substring.

so here is what i found and was amazed with the power of bash or regular expression.

first to substring on a string based on my character

#! /bin/bash
String=waqastoor #substring based on t
resultingString= ${String%t*} #will result in waqas
resultingString=${String:5} #will result in toor

easy isn’t it

now counting the characters part

resultingString=${#String} #will result in 9

strange how you can manipulate string in bash just with regular expression. Some people prefer sed and awk to make these work. But i believe digging deep into bash and regular expressions you wont be needing sed , awk etc may be those are used when things get really nasty in string manipulation. But the tasks i achieved from string compare to string concatenation to substring and finding a character in string. You can use simple regular expression and in bash you can achieve it.

Now looking from a problem with string where bash and regular expression fails

for further reading for the interested ones http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html

so i am back and i’ve got a lot of stories to tell was busy with a lot of coding and designing and will now share what i found interesting in my fight with all those tools and languages