How to configure locales in Ubuntu 14 LTS, Trusty Tahr
This tutorial will explain how we can configure locales in Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Trusty Tahr from the command line. All commands work under Ubuntu 12 Precise as well.
Contents
1. How to display the ‘Current Settings’
2. How to display the ‘Available Locales’
3. How to adjust locales
4. References/External source
1. How to display the Current Settings
$ locale LANG= LANGUAGE= LC_CTYPE="POSIX" LC_NUMERIC="POSIX" LC_TIME="POSIX" LC_COLLATE="POSIX" LC_MONETARY="POSIX" LC_MESSAGES="POSIX" LC_PAPER="POSIX" LC_NAME="POSIX" LC_ADDRESS="POSIX" LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX" LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX" LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX" LC_ALL=
2. How to display the Available Locales
$ locale -a C C.UTF-8 POSIX fr_FR.utf8
If one of the desired locales does not appear in the list, then it will need to be installed additionally.
$ locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 Generating locales... en_EN.UTF-8... done Generation complete.
To check all the available locales view the file : /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
3. How to adjust locales
The default configurations are stored in the /etc/default/locale
file.
$ cat /etc/default/locale LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
If the above file doesn’t exist, then it can be generated and adjusted using the following command :
$ echo "LANG=en_US.utf8" > /etc/default/locale $ cat /etc/default/locale LANG=en_US.utf8
You can find a list of all the LC_* environment variables on the official site of ubuntu at help.ubuntu.com
This will be very useful for instance, if a system is required to be operated in French, however the error and system messages will still be displayed in English. This is quite helpful, when we’re looking for errors. For this scenario, we can attempt the following settings to /etc/default/locale
file:
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=POSIX
4. References/External source
Ubuntu Community Documentation: Locale (help.ubuntu.com)
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