Locale, Date & Time

Locale

In Linux, a locale is a set of environment variables that defines the language, country, and character encoding settings for a user's environment. Locales affect various aspects of a program's behavior, such as the way dates and times are displayed, the format of numbers, the sort order of strings, and the language used for messages.

---

View locale configuration

localectl

and

locale

View specific locale variable option

locale LC_NUMERIC

View available locales

localectl list-locales

---

Setting locale

localectl set-locale LANG=fr_FR.utf8

(reboot may be required)

---

Time

---

Check system time

date

or for more detail

timedatectl

---

NTP

View current NTP configuration:

timedatectl show-timesync --all

Enable NTP

timedatectl set-ntp on

Disable NTP

timedatectl set-ntp off

NTP Server selection

Most mainstream Linux distributions come with NTP servers preconfigured, these can be altered however, this is done via the /etc/systemd/timesync.conf file. Simply add a new line to the file formatted as follows:

NTP=NTPSERVERHOSTNAME

---

Timezone

Check available timezones

timedatectl list-timezones

Set server timezone

timedatectl set-timezone timezonename

The available timezone files are stored within the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. The /etc/localtime is used to set the current local timezone. This is done via a symlink to the appropriate zone info file;

daniel@jump:~$ ls -la /etc/localtime 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 May 30 06:27 /etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/UTC

---