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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------