Euro Support in Debian

December 31st, 2001

On January 1, 2002, twelve of the countries in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) will start to use the new Euro (EUR) currency: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. The Vatican City is also participating in the changeover. Countries that have used the currency of one of the above countries will adopt the Euro as well. This makes it a total of about forty countries which will share the common currency.

Since the Euro currency is represented by a symbol of its own, supporting this requires some adjustments in operating systems. Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote the Debian Euro HOWTO which explains how to set this up on a Debian system.

It includes instructions for setting up the Euro symbol both on the Linux console and in the X Window System. Additionally, special Euro packages were uploaded (euro-support, tetex-eurosym) to provide easy support for the Euro symbol.