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Casey Keller
Asked: 2010-10-12 20:49:25 +0800 CST

How do I set the representation of dates?

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Living in the United States, it is most common to have dates expressed like the following:

  • Oct 12, 2010
  • October, 12, 2010
  • 10/12/2010
  • Tue Oct 12
  • Tuesday, October 12, 2010

I prefer the big endian form for my dates like below:

  • 2010 October 12
  • 2010-10-12
  • 2010 Oct 12, Tuesday

or the little endian form

  • 12 October 2010
  • Tuesday 12 October 2010
  • 12.10.2010

4 digit years, 2 digit month

Without changing the locales information for my currency, etc, how would I go about setting this up so that system wide it can be expressed in either of the types of forms.

10.10 configuration locale

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This page has a good walkthrough for what you want:

    http://ccollins.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/how-to-change-date-formats-on-ubuntu/

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  2. You can set LC_TIME separately to a locale that supports those (but make sure that that locale is supported on your system!).

    You can add support for a locale with System --> Administration --> Language Support in the GUI, or with locale-gen (read the manual, it's not trivial) on the command line.

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