The locale support has been updated in libc 5.4.x. You can avoid many of
the individual programs setups described in section
International character sets in specific applications if the programs
on your system is prepared for locale support. The Debian distribution comes
with this support if you install the wg15-locale package. Read the
Locales mini-HOWTO if you want to set up locale support on a non-Debian
system.
To enable support for the Danish locale you just have to set one of the following environment variables:
LANG=da_DK.ISO_8859-1
or
LC_ALL=da_DK.ISO_8859-1
The difference between LANG and LC_ALL is, that while
LANG can be overridden for the individual locale categories,
LC_ALL can't. Both environment variables set all the individual
locale catgories. See the Locales mini-HOWTO for information about locale
categories.
A few programs such as bash and GNU emacs still needs specific
setup, but most should work without further attention. Programs such as
nvi which didn't work with 8 bit characters before should work now.
Locale support should be more common as distributions based on the new
GNU libc 2 (libc 6.x) becomes available.