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I am running xubuntu 14.04 and recently changed my /etc/default/locale to

LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
**LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"**
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_GB:en"

Everything seems to work fine except the time and numeric format, which is still in german. Checking with locale -a yields:

LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
**LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8**
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

I am pretty sure it has to do with the regional format settings in the graphical interface provided by xubuntu (Start>>Settings>>Language support>>Regional format), which are "german" for me. This seems to override my locale settings. Is there any way to keep these regional settings from overriding the settings in my /etc/default/locale?

And, yes I did a restart after my changes ;)

Thanks in advance

1 Answer 1

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Manually editing /etc/default/locale is usually not a good idea on an *ubuntu desktop.

If you want that the changes affect all users on the system, you can create a file in the /etc/profile.d/ folder, for instance like this:

$ cat /etc/profile.d/locale-tweak.sh
export LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
export LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8

Otherwise, to affect your own user only, you can put those export commands in your ~/.profile file instead.

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  • @asdu52: Glad to hear that. Can you please mark the answer as "best", so others more easily see that the problem was solved. Nov 15, 2014 at 20:27
  • I'd like to, but it says I need at least 15 reputation in order to do that. :-S Maybe a mod can mark the answer?
    – asdu52
    Nov 17, 2014 at 10:05
  • @asdu52: I'm not sure, but I think it's upvoting you can't do without a reputation, while you can accept an answer. Nov 17, 2014 at 15:00
  • @GunnarHjalmarsson: "is usually not a good idea"? Why exactly? These configuration files are meant to be overridden. Can you provide any authoritative sources for the claim? Jun 8, 2015 at 20:15
  • @0xC0000022L: Because the GUI uses it, and manual overrides are easily overwritten. The same is true for ~/.pam_environment (per user settings). Hence it's better to override through e.g. /etc/profile.d/*sh and/or ~/.profile. (I wrote the code which is currently used by Language Selector and friends.) Jun 8, 2015 at 22:44

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