A short memo about the procedure to change LATIN1 to LATIN2 code page in Oracle XE (I can’t remember where I originally found this tip, probably somewhere on OTN!?):

1) Make sure you download and install Oracle XE (Western European) version of XE (single byte character set) and not Universal (Unicode)

2) change the database character set to EE8MSWIN1250:

cmd> sqlplus /nolog
sql> connect / as sysdba 
sql> SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE;
sql> STARTUP MOUNT;
sql> ALTER SYSTEM ENABLE RESTRICTED SESSION;
sql> ALTER SYSTEM SET JOB_QUEUE_PROCESSES=0;
sql> ALTER SYSTEM SET AQ_TM_PROCESSES=0;
sql> ALTER DATABASE OPEN;
sql> ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET INTERNAL_USE EE8MSWIN1250;
sql> SHUTDOWN;
sql> STARTUP RESTRICT;
sql> SHUTDOWN;
sql> STARTUP; 

That’s it. Now, you have Oracle XE with EE8MSWIN1250. This can be useful if you want to support old clients (for example Oracle Forms) that doesn’t recognize AL32UTF8 code page that is used in Universal distribution.