Can't get gettext (php) on Ubuntu working

The following example works on Mac OS X with Apache, i.e. I get the translated string echoed back. But on Ubuntu with lighttpd I get the original text 'Inactive account'. I've tried all sorts of combinations of environment varialbes without any luck. It's not file permissions either because I can echo out the contents of the .mo file.

<?php

//$locale = 'sv_SE.UTF-8';
$locale = 'sv_SE';

$dir = dirname(__FILE__);

// File permission is apparantly not a problem as this works...
//echo file_get_contents($dir . '/sv_SE/LC_MESSAGES/flattr.mo');

putenv("LANG=$locale");
putenv("LANGUAGE=$locale");
putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");
putenv("LC_MESSAGES=$locale");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
setlocale(LC_MESSAGES, $locale);
//setlocale(LANG, $locale);
//setlocale(LANGUAGE, $locale);

bindtextdomain('flattr', $dir);
//bind_textdomain_codeset("flattr", 'UTF-8');
textdomain('flattr');

echo _("Inactive account");

?>

Anyone have any ideas?

I was facing the same problem. I'll describe the things I did to fix it on Ubuntu 10.10.

1) make sure you have 'gettext' installed,

$ sudo apt-get install gettext

Alternatively, you can install 'php-gettext' if 'gettext' cannot be installed. The package 'php-gettext' is not required if you already have 'gettext' installed.

2) Then generate the locale for your language. In this example I'll use 'sv_SE'. Look up the supported locales in '/usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED',

less /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

You'll find multiple lines that start with 'sv_SE',

sv_SE.UTF-8 UTF-8
sv_SE ISO-8859-1
sv_SE.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15

This means you have multiple options for generating the locale for sv_SE. To generate the locale for the default character set, run the following command,

$ sudo locale-gen sv_SE

If you want to generate that locale for the UTF-8 character set, run this command,

$ sudo locale-gen sv_SE.UTF-8

Restart Apache after generating locales,

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

3) Finally, update your PHP script to match the locale you generated. If you generated the locale for 'sv_SE',

setlocale(LC_ALL, "sv_SE");

But if you generated the UTF-8 equivalent of that locale, use,

setlocale(LC_ALL, "sv_SE.UTF-8");

All should work now.