5.0 KiB
Quick notes on
localectl settings
Automaattinen sisällysluettelo / Automatically generated Table of Contents
Ready commands
Finland compatible internationalish English
sudo localectl set-locale LANG=en_IE.utf8 LC_TIME=en_DK.utf8 LC_MONETARY=fi_FI.utf8 LC_NAME=fi_FI.utf8 LC_TELEPHONE=fi_FI.utf8- Everything will be in English, but time will be in ISO 8601,
financial units use Finnish separators, names are sorted according to
Finnish alphabet (a, …, x, y, z, å, ä, ö) and phone numbers begin with
the Finnish
+358prefix.
Finland Finnish
sudo localectl set-locale LANG=fi_FI.utf8 LC_TIME=fi_FI.utf8 LC_MONETARY=fi_FI.utf8 LC_NAME=fi_FI.utf8 LC_TELEPHONE=fi_FI.utf8Explanations
- LANG is the language and defaults for other variables if they are
unset. en_DK gives ISO 8601 date format for everything respecting
LC_TIME.
LANG=en_IE datereturnsSun 02 Jun 2024 11:05:04 EEST, whileLANG=en_DK datereturns2024-06-02T11:05:04 EEST.
- LC_MONETARY sets the currency and how sums of it are managed.
- LC_NAME sets name format and I prefer Finnish (just the name) to
Irish which probably has
M{r,s,rs}and I hate them being gendered and I doubt it understands Mx. - LC_TELEPHONE sets telephone number format and I set it to fi_FI as it defaults international numbers to +358 and I am more likely to be typing Finnish numbers than Irish. I imagine it can affect office tools, and it’s here more of just in case.
And naturally to use these locales, they must be compiled.
So /etc/locale.gen must include the lines
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_IE.UTF-8 UTF-8
# If you don't have en_US, things will break!
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
fi_FI.UTF-8 UTF-8and as always, after editing that file, you must run
sudo locale-gen.
(Debian & deriative users, you have
dpkg-reconfigure locales that merges the editing and
locale-gen and that is probably what you are supposed to use.)
It seems like I didn’t even say anything about that UTF-8 part, but it’s 2024 and everything is UTF-8 (or your things are horribly broken and the rest of the world hates you).
Sources/thanks:
- Arch Wiki: Locale, LC_TIME
- Locale Helper: en_IE
- Locale Helper: fi_FI
- Wikipedia: UTF-8
- Random misplaced advice: disable charset fallback in your IRC client
and be UTF-8 only! You will see when someone is not using UTF-8 and
won’t submit useless bug reports to bots/bridges/whatever that are UTF-8
only (as supporting every charset is impossible, since IRC has nothing
to declare character set, and there is zero reason why you wouln’t be
using UTF-8! Well nowadays some have IRCv3
UTF8ONLYISUPPORTtoken).
- Random misplaced advice: disable charset fallback in your IRC client
and be UTF-8 only! You will see when someone is not using UTF-8 and
won’t submit useless bug reports to bots/bridges/whatever that are UTF-8
only (as supporting every charset is impossible, since IRC has nothing
to declare character set, and there is zero reason why you wouln’t be
using UTF-8! Well nowadays some have IRCv3
- ISO 8601
- You should read it or at least be aware of it especially if you are in contact with people from other countries and even more if you are in international communities trying to get anything done with anything that has to do with time or date!
2019-12-27: I don’t see LANGUAGE mentioned here, but it was blocking
me from changing language of GNOME and
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales in the end gave me
*** update-locale: Warning: LANGUAGE (en_US:en) is not compatible with LANG (fi_FI.UTF-8). Disabling it..
Either I was wrong on it being list of fallback languages I wish to
use, or GNOME has different view on it, but as I think I have seen
errors related to it before, I will drop LANGUAGE from the
variables I set.
2024-04-04: export LANGUAGE=eo:fi:en in a file read by
my zshrc
works fine as it gets read before my startsway
anyway.
2024-06-02: fixed a lot of language, practically rewrote the page.