Locale configuration on Ubuntu

OK, first I was annoyed that changing the date format to ISO (yyyy-mm-dd) is not so easy on Ubuntu as it was on Windows. Yes, but - as usual in the Linux world - you are much more flexible on Ubuntu.

I am a special case: I want my menus and environment in english, I am located in Austria (so I want currency in Euro, thousands separator is dot and not comma, ...) but the date format I like to have in ISO format (and not the german default dd.mm.yyyy) because I find the ISO format simple the most practical (well, I am working in IT and the ISO format is the best to sort if you have just plain text). Under Windows I had a german OS (because I needed to support mostly users with german version) and changed the date format in the international settings.

Situation under Ubuntu is different: You install an english base system and install whatever languages you like through:

1. "System - Administration - Language Support"
   
2. Click "Install/Remove languages..."
   
3. Choose the language(s) you want to support - every user can choose the language he/she likes at login (last used language is remembered as preselection).
   
4. In the "Language for menus and windows" list you can drag and drop languages to specify priorities. The language the user chooses at login is taken first of course, but usually the language dragged to first place here is the default for new users. Attention: When installing a new language, it is usually put on top and somehow the system tries now logging in all existing users with that language (if they don't change it at login) - so doing changes here overwrites the last remembered language for the users. This behavior might be desired or not...
   
5. In the text tab you can change the country you are in (this is similar to the Windows international settings - but you can't override parts of the country settings here.

So first, I found that I have less options than under Windows - until I discovered these options that you can set in your /etc/default/locale (a plain text file):

 LANG="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"  
 LC_ALL=  

So you can really define the behavior of plenty of formattings!
The content of my etc/default/locale is now (LANG and LANGUAGE was set when I changed settings in the GUI, LC_DATE and LC_TIME I have added manually:

 LANG="de_DE.utf8"  
 LANGUAGE="en"  
 LC_DATE="en_DK.utf8"  
 LC_TIME="en_DK.utf8"  

I have added LC_DATE myself (just a wild guess because it is not mentioned in the list above - which I found on the internet), for Thunderbird for example LC_TIME was sufficient.

Probably this obsoletes post "Firefox change default page format" (but did not check).

Related posts: Firefox change default page format, OpenOffice and LibreOffice starts slow, Default paper size in Open Office, Normal.dot in OpenOffice or LibreOffice.