nxclient / locale passing

So, I achieved victory on getting the compose key to work in the NX session. On to get a proper English language setting on our Terminal Server.

The configuration suffers from two problems:
(1) /etc/environment had values set (LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 and LANGUAGE=nl_NL:nl). (2) nxssh does not pass the LANG/LC_* environment variables.

If I were to remove the /etc/environment variables and configure everything like in a previous post of mine, everyone gets the POSIX locale (nxssh doesn’t pass anything). That’s not good. I can’t find a way to get nxssh(1) to send the needed environment, so we’ll have to look elsewhere.

The fix: configure sshd(1) on the server to PermitUserEnvironment yes and create a custom ~/.ssh/environment in my homedir on the server with the following settings:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8

My environment gets loaded after the global environment, so I get my custom locale. At the same time I haven’t broken it for everyone else. (Observe that the PermitUserEnvironment can have security implications in some cases.)