Default System Language (All your language are belong to USA!)

[arizonagrooveje]

Ok, so this is really annoying me now.
Until last night I had FC2. My default system language was British English. I installed FC4 then after the install I realised my default system language was American English. So I ran system-config-language and found he only option listed was English (USA).
After some looking around it seems that adding additional languages after the install is prety much impossible. Which is not very helpful. So I decided to re-install and select the British English option in the Language Packages group. So I did that, at least I think I did, but when I started up the new install, ran system-config-language, again only English (USA) listed.
Maybe I forgot to tick the option I thought. I'll install again, I have the time.
This time I thought 'the hell with it, let's just select every language'. So I did. I selected every single language listed in the Language Support package group. I watched the installed as it installed font packges for every langage it had. Once the install was done I logged in, ran system-config-language...

Only.
One.
Option.
English (USA).

WTF?

Can someone please enlighted me as to how I get some other default system language than English (USA)? Thunderbird will only show the dates in US format which I find very annoying. I struggled with this on FC2 before realising my default system language was English (USA) and changed it to British English. After that Thunderbird displayed the dates the way I wanted. Thunderbird date formats aside, I live in England, not USA, I want my system to speak the same varient of English that I do.

[VN-Frank]

Try:

export LANG=en_GB

or

export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

-

add one of these into ~/.bashrc

-
add it system wide default into /etc/sysconfig/i18n

[arizonagrooveje]

Ok I modified my /etc/sysconfig/i18n so it now looks like

LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en:en_GB.UTF-8:en_GB:en"

Reboot, run thunderbird and nice British formated dates.

This seem like an absurd way of having to do it though. If you are allowed to pick laguages during install why does the system then not provide any way to actually select them for use short of manually editing a file?

[petey318]

Thank you so much! I was also struggling with this, having done a fresh FC9 install. In my case the problem was simply the formatting of dates/times in the output of the "ls -l" command - looked everywhere to change these settings but to no avail.

Would this be something that should go into the FC9 installation notes, and if so, how would we get that to happen?

thanks for the post!