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We have an old application based on Lotus Notes R5. We're systematically eleminating Windows from the office, but the application still has to be available. Thus I've turned to Wine for help. The Lotus Notes 5.0.5 client installed just fine under Wine, no problem so far. The application started and worked just like in Windows. I had only two issues: a few characters were not displayed properly (obviously a font issue) and the Lotus Notes client used wrong currency symbol for displaying formatted numbers.

The font problem turned out to be as easy to solve as to enable an option in the Lotus Notes client: in the menu enable "File" / "Preferences" / "User Preferences" / "Additional Options" / "Enable Unicode display". That's all.

The other problem was a bit trickier. The currency symbol was "$" in Wine, but the Hungarian "Ft" was used in Windows. Since we were printing invoices in the application, a "$" symbol was not an option. The solution: setting the LANG variable (and/or the LC_* variables) and adding the proper locale support in Ubuntu.

Here're the main steps:

• Install the required locale on your Ubuntu setup. I got the know-how for this from a blog post.
  The list of supported locales can be found in the file /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED. The installed locales are defined in files in the /var/lib/locales/supported.d directory. The various language-pack-* packages install files like en or hu (for Hungarian language support) and there's a file named local. You can put your custom locales in that one. I already had the locale hu_HU.UTF-8 listed in the hu file and starting Wine with LANG=hu_HU.UTF-8 has set the various regional settings to Hungarian (the currency symbol was OK in Lotus Notes), but unfortunately the the Hungarian keys were not working, when I switched to Hungarian keyboard layout. Strange, since my default LANG was en_US.UTF-8 and Hungarian layout works in Ubuntu with that.
  No problem: I've added the hu_HU ISO-8859-2 locale to the /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local file and executed dpkg-reconfigure locales and my new locale was generated.
• From now on I start Wine with LANG=hu_HU.ISO-8859-2 variable defined. Eg. to start the Lotus Notes client I use the following command line:
  
  env LANG=hu_HU.ISO-8859-2 wine "C:\Lotus\Notes\notes.exe"

Now I have proper regional settings in my Wine configuration (eg. the currency sign is properly set to "Ft") and Hungarian keys work too. Of course all this is useful for running any app in Wine, but the problems first emerged with the Lotus application.