[ILUG] how to set locale globally on Ubuntu system?

[Pádraig Brady]

John Kinsella wrote:
> Hi.
> It's not a big deal but it would be nice to have European/UK/Irish
> locale so that dates (in thunderbird mail client in particular) are
> dd/mm/yyyy rathe rthan the us mm/dd/yyyy.
> 
> I could bodge up a wrapper with
> 
> #!/bin/sh
>  export LC_TIME=en_GB # or whatever you want
>  <FullPathToYourOriginalThunderbirdCommand>/thunderbird $*
> 
> (from mozillazine)
> 
> but surely better to have *right* locale which should be: en_IE.utf8
> defined globally.
> 
> Present locale is en_US.UTF-8

If you're the only user of the system then the is the way to go.

A quick check of an ubuntu system shows
the default system LANG is configured in the
/etc/default/gdm and /etc/environment files.
Probably you just need to edit the later and reboot.

Another complication (which is enabled by default on ubuntu)
is that the LANGUAGE environment variable takes priority over LANG.
The LANGUAGE variable allows you to specify a list of languages to try
when translating.

There probably is a GUI tool to handle all this...
Yes there is System -> Administration -> Language Selector

> Just putting export LC_TIME=en_IE.utf8 in my .bashrc presumably wont
> affect thunderbird so how do I set LC_TIME globally?

It is a shell script (possibly with the --login parameter)
that runs X etc., so settings in .bashrc should be picked up by everything.
See: `info bash 'Bash Features' 'Bash Startup Files'`
On a Fedora server at least I put different export LANG=lg_CY.charset values
into various ~users/.bashrc files and they were picked up automatically
when they vnc'd in.

Pádraig.