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Everyone is asking how to make Monday the first day of the week, here I am stuck with it unable to change it.

I tried already changing the lines in /usr/share/i18n files but no luck and doesn't seem to change anything.

gnome system calendar

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  • Your language settings can have an effect on this too. Type locale from the command line and look for LC_TIME what does it say?
    – WinEunuuchs2Unix
    Jun 16, 2018 at 18:03
  • LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
    – M-Raw
    Jun 16, 2018 at 18:28

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
7

A similar question was asked here: Monday as first day in Gnome-Shell (instead of Sunday).

  1. Use sudo -H gedit /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_GB.
  2. Edit the value of first_weekday to 1.
  3. Save the file, restart the system.

There is a second variable: first_workday that is set to 2. Some calendar's may refer to this variable but I would initially leave it unchanged unless further tweaking is needed.

Essentially you will make your GB locale look like the US locale:

$ cat /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_GB | grep week -A1
week    7;19971130;4
first_weekday 2
first_workday 2

$ cat /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_US | grep week -A1
week    7;19971130;7
first_weekday   1
first_workday   2

I don't know what the week variable does so would leave it unchanged at first.

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  • i already tried all that, when i first tried this back in ubunto17.10 it worked, but now it seems that the changes i make are completely ignored in the i18n files.
    – M-Raw
    Jun 16, 2018 at 19:09
  • In this case I would find it better to advise users to use the possibility to add (potentially copied and modified) own locales to /usr/local/share/i18n/locales, as documented in /usr/share/doc/locales/README.Debian
    – Sebastian Stark
    Jun 16, 2018 at 19:10
  • 1
    set the region to Canada en_CA for now, but i would like to have my own with tiny tweaks to it
    – M-Raw
    Jun 16, 2018 at 19:16
  • 1
    man 5 locale describes the meaning of each attribute. For the week, it is " a list of three values separated by semicolons: The number of days in a week (by default 7), a date of beginning of the week (by default corresponds to Sunday), and the minimal length of the first week in year (by default 4). Regarding the start of the week, 19971130 shall be used for Sunday and 19971201 shall be used for Monday".
    – hnagaty
    May 13, 2021 at 13:36
  • 2
    I think you need to run sudo locale-gen after editing the file.
    – Flimm
    Nov 4, 2022 at 11:47
3

I had a similar problem with changing the first day of the week for the Australian locale (en_AU); I wanted to change the first day of the week from Sunday to Monday. However, the locale file did not make any reference to "first_weekday". I got the desired change I wanted by:

  • opening this file for edits as as super user sudo gedit /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_AU
  • adding the line first_weekday 2 to the section of this file labelled "LC_TIME"
  • Updating the system locale information sudo locale-gen
  • Logging out and logging in again.
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  • 1
    Cheers! I avoided having to re-login by reloading Gnome using: Alt+F2, r, Enter
    – ZimbiX
    Nov 28, 2019 at 7:15
  • Works in Ubuntu 22.04. I wanted Sunday as first day of the week.
    – Daniel
    Apr 24, 2022 at 20:25
0

I know it's an old question, but it's the first google result when searching for this issue.

There's no need to change files outside your home folder. Just add LC_TIME=en_US.utf8 to your profile file:

echo "export LC_TIME=en_US.utf8" >> ~/.profile

You'll need to login again for it to take effect.

Modifying configs outside your home folder makes it harder to transfer them to a new machine or a new OS install.

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