Edit: Future me is still glad these archives are here.
Originally posted March 18, 2014 on AIXchange
If you’ve ever installed locale files on your AIX server, you might appreciate my recent predicament. A customer’s application team recently asked me to install bos.loc.utf.EN_US as part of their overall installation. The file exists on the installation media, but not in .bff format. So how do you install it?
Web searching was of little help (perhaps I didn’t enter the most accurate search terms). In any event, my searches turned up links like this, this and this, none of which were what I was really looking for. I just wanted to learn how to install the filesets.
Through blind luck and poking around, ultimately I went into smitty > system environments > manage language environment > add additional language environments.
For both the cultural convention to install and the language translation to install I selected:
UTF-8 English (United States) [EN-US]
I told it where to find the files, and it worked.
I cut and pasted my smitty screen below. Hopefully this will help you visualize what I’m talking about:
Add Additional Language Environments
Type or select values in entry fields.
Press Enter AFTER making all desired changes.
[Entry Fields]
CULTURAL convention to install UTF-8 English (U> +
LANGUAGE translation to install UTF-8 English (U> +
* INPUT device/directory for software [/dev/cd0] +
EXTEND file systems if space needed? yes +
WPAR Management
Perform Operation in Global Environment yes +
Perform Operation on Detached WPARs no +
Detached WPAR Names [_all_wpars] +
Remount Installation Device in WPARs yes +
Alternate WPAR Installation Device []
The process to install this fileset was easier than I’d expected (as using smitty usually is), though less intuitive than I’d hoped (you have to know to go into the language environments in the first place).
Incidentally, one reason I’m writing about this this experience is simply to have it documented somewhere. I actually will do web searches when I’m working on an issue, and find the answer in a link to something I’d written years earlier. In fact it happens fairly often. So as much as I enjoy sharing with readers, I admit I have another, slightly selfish motivation for writing these posts. Sometimes they help Future Me solve problems. Hopefully Future Me will appreciate the time I took to write about this particular issue.