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.

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View locale configuration

localectl

and

locale

View specific locale variable option

locale LC_NUMERIC

View available locales

localectl list-locales

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Setting locale

localectl set-locale LANG=fr_FR.utf8

(reboot may be required)

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Time

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Check system time

date

or for more detail

timedatectl

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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

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Timezone

Check available timezones

timedatectl list-timezones

Set server timezone

timedatectl set-timezone timezonename

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