Ubuntu – English as a system language but Russian regional settings

languagelanguage-supportlocale

I usually choose English as an installation language since I believe that the original is better than the translation. However, the environment I'm working in is mostly Russian, so I have to deal with locale specificity.

Even worse is the fact that selecting English yields to royal measurement system, that is, feet, inches, and damned letter paper size. Whatever I do, I didn't manage to get rid of letter paper size – eventually here and there I stumble upon letter as a hidden default, and that spoils my prints.

How can I select and use English as my language, but use metric system everywhere and a4 paper size everywhere, and Russian regional settings (date, time, decimal etc).

Best Answer

If you execute locale you can see the language variables that are used for various sections of the operating system:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

More about locale variables in the gettext manual: Locale Environment Variables - GNU `gettext' utilities

You can export these variables e.g. export LC_PAPER="ru_RU.UTF-8" - this will make a temporary change.

If you want to make it permanent you can change the regional formats using gnome-language-selector. Or you can add the export command in ~/.profile and/or ~/.bashrc

For the papersize, I found that you can edit /etc/papersize - change "letter" to "a4". You might also need to set export LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF_8" (or maybe export LC_PAPER="ru_RU.UTF_8" if ru_RU defaults to A4)

Source: answers.launchpad.net: Question #6846 : Questions : “evince” package : Ubuntu

P.S. Personally I use en_GB (English / United Kingdom) for everything since it uses the SI metric system instead of American English and US units.

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