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Jonik
Asked: 2010-11-04 06:44:16 +0800 CST

How to change user's language (locale) back to English? [duplicate]

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I made the mistake of trying out some settings through Administration -> Language Support. Now my user account has LANG set to fi_FI.utf8, even though I want to use en_US.utf8. (This is kind-of a follow up to this.)

Listing 1: current locale settings for my user account:

$ locale
LANG=fi_FI.utf8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_PAPER=fi_FI.utf8
LC_NAME="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT=fi_FI.utf8
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_ALL=

Listing 2: /etc/default/locale which contains the locale settings I want to use:

$ cat /etc/default/locale 
LANG="en_US.utf8"

LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="fi_FI.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fi_FI.utf8"

The Administration -> Language support settings look like this:

My specific questions:

  • Where exactly (in what file) are the user-specific locale settings (listing 1) stored?
  • What is the recommended way of changing that? By editing a file or through some config UI? (I want to use the settings in listing 2.)

The root annoyance which prompted me to ask this: How to change Firefox UI language from Finnish back to English?

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 if that makes any difference.

gnome locale language

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Specify the language at the login prompt after selecting the user. When asked whether to make the selection the new default, select yes.

    • 9

  2. The per-user locale default for the Desktop session is stored in ~/.dmrc. This is the file that is updated when selecting a new locale at the GDM screen. GDM uses this to set up the environment when starting the user's session.

    • 6

  3. If "User Accounts" is crashing each time you start it, you should reset the accounts.

    To get the error-message, run 'gnome-control-center' from a terminal and click on "User Accounts". You'll probably see something like this:

        (gnome-control-center:5060): common-cc-panel-WARNING **: locale 'xx_XX:nl_NL:en_GB:en
    xx_XX' isn't valid

    To fix, run the command gnome-language-selector. Try changing the locale and language settings to a different one and see if that resolves your problem. Then change back.

    Also run sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales to see of there are any cache-errors. By purging the bad locales with sudo dpkg-reconfigure localepurge you could probably solve the original problem which caused the crashing.

    [source]

    • 1

  4. Just open terminal and type sudo gedit then the text editor will open.
    Then open the file locale located underneath the etc/default.
    Then just edit the LANGUAGE=en and LANG="en_US.utf8".

    • 0