after having some problems with national characters on my system (Ubuntu 6.10 on AMD64) I took the time to track down the issue... To be brief, it wasn't a problem with a misconfigured locale setting, it was a problem with the 32-bit compatiblity libraries provided - I hope that it'll be fixed with the next Ubuntu distribution.
The culprit was /usr/lib32/libX11.so.6.2.0, containing a reference to /usr/lib/X11/locale and trying to load other libraries from there. Sadly the libraries found there are the 64-bit version, thus being incompatible.
Solution:
1) Use a hex editor and patch the file. Replace the string '/usr/lib/X11/locale' with a path you wish - I chose to replace the last two letters so that the path reads as '/usr/lib/X11/loca32'
2) Generate two soft links that the necessary libraries and files are to be found at the desired location.
The resulting soft links look like this...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 2007-03-24 11:46 /usr/lib/X11/loca32 -> /usr/lib32/X11/locale
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-03-24 11:51 /usr/share/X11/locale/loca32.dir -> locale.dir
Regards,
Alderic LeShelle
Additional keywords: Keyboard locale