[Digikam-users] Locale question

[Fabien]

Hi,

Neil Winchurst wrote:
> I have been using Digikam version 0.8.0 for some time with my old Linux 
> distro Mandriva2006. Recently I have moved to Kubuntu Edgy. Here I find 
> Digikam 0.8.2 which I have started to use. I have copied all my albums 
> from the old distro to the new distro.
>
> Every time I start Digikam I get a message about change of locale, which 
> I do not understand. The locale has changed, I am told.  Old locale is 
> ISO 8859-1. New locale is UTF-8. I am advised that this may cause 
> problems and that I should correct the locale setting before restarting 
> Digikam.

It's all about character encodings.
Look here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1

<<
In computing applications, encodings that provide full UCS (Universal 
character set) support (such as UTF-8 and UTF-16) are finding increasing 
favor over encodings based on ISO 8859-1.
 >>
So, it's good to use utf-8 because it's becoming the default encoding now...

> Can anyone explain all this please, and tell me how to change the 
> setting? Or should I start afresh with this new version and forget my 
> old photographs?
No, hopefully you don't need to do that :)
The only thing wrong here is that digikam should ask you only once this 
question. If you say "yes", digikam keeps this setting in its database 
and won't ask again for it, except if you change again your locale.

Are you sure you have read/write access to the digikam db (digikam3.db) 
? This file is in the root directory of your Albums (eg ~/Pictures).

You can check the setting with sqlite3 :
$ sqlite3  digikam3.db "select * from Settings"
DBVersion|1
UpgradedFromSqlite2|yes
Locale|UTF-8
Scanned|2006-11-14T12:43:29

==> here, you have Locale = "UTF-8".

--
Fabien