I personally like English language operating systems. So I have set my Ubuntu to English language. But I still want German curency, decimals and time. With most applications, you can define the formats to use inside the application. But I stumbled at Evolution which lets you define 12/24-hour setting for the calendar, but doesn’t use this setting for the mail list display.
So I added the following lines to the file /etc/environment below the LANG="en_US.UTF-8":
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"Code language: JavaScript (javascript)So the most formats where as I wanted them – despite the time. Yes, I could set LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8", but this not only produces German formats but also German names for the months and weekdays. And this is something I didn’t want: The whole application in English language but the months and weekdays in German, e.g. “Freitag 11:42”.
So there are now two possibilities:
- you compile your own locale definition, or
- you take a Hex editor and modify the existing one
I decided to do the second.
In /usr/lib/locale are all locale definitions. So I made a backup of the original LC_TIME below en_US.utf8 and fired up ghex2.
So in principle there are two strings of every format – one in ANSI encoding which is directly readable, and one in Unicode where there are 3x 00-Bytes between the single characters. So in general I just replaced all %r (12hrs time) by %R (24hrs time) and removed the %p (AM/PM). I also changed the date format %m/%d/%Y to %Y-%m-%d to get the international format. As mentioned, I had to make these changes 2x times – once for the ANSI strings and once for the Unicode ones.
To get the first day of the week correctly (Monday here in Europe), I first had to change the location 0x912 from 02 to 01 (which means: The first workday of the week is now Sunday (1st day) instead of Monday (2nd day)). So to finally get the European week, I also had to change location 0x90c from decimal value 19971130 (a Sunday) to 19971201 (a Monday, new value in Hex: 81bc3001). So now the first day of the week was a Monday (Dec. 1st, 1997) and thus the week and work-week were corrected.
The en_US locale has the first 7-day-week as the first week of the year. In Europe, the first week with at least 4 days is counted as the first week of the year (DIN 1355 / ISO 8601). So I changed location 0x910 from 07 to 04.
Finally, I still had Evolution showing AM/PM times. I fixed this by overwriting these strings with Null-Bytes (00h) – again, two times for each. This made Evolution show 24hrs times.
Paper Format
The default paper format can be changed as described here:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure libpaper1Or you just change the file /etc/papersize.