Language/Locale

I'm a minimalist.

So my UBUNTU/Debian installations end up quite minimalistic. Most of the time the locale/language environment needs manual adjustment.

Living in Austria I'd like my environment, like date/time stamp, to be displayed according to EU/German/Austria Standards.

But the I like my system to talk to me in English...

This is the way to go:

You need the package belocs-locales-bin installed.

Now "compile" the needed locale environments:

# locale-gen de_AT
# locale-gen de_AT.UTF-8
# locale-gen en_DK
# locale-gen en_DK.UTF-8
# locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

If you do not live in Austria, you'll have to use different Language Definitions. But make sure to include en_US.

Next You have to tell your System to use those Environments. For that add following lines to your /etc/environment ...

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LC_TIME="en_DK.UTF-8"

Setting LC_TIME to en_DK will use the International Time Format (ISO 8601) for date/time output.

Now logout, and login again to activate the changes. Even better would be to reboot.

That's it ... for the system.

To have Thunderbird display the correct format (for date and time), I'd recommend using the ConfigDate plugin for Thunderbird.