Before users can get comfortable
with working in a Linux environment,
they may need to have the system localized
to their specific region, culture, or preference.
Localization is the process of adapting system components
for use within a distinct culture,
other than the culture
that the system was originally designed for.
So in this demonstration,
we'll configure a localization option
for a user who resides in London.
So the main utilities we're focused on is
the time-date control and the locale control commands.
So let's hop right in.
Okay, now you see the output from the time-date control.
It just gives us a variety of different time.
So we see our locale time, universal time, NTP.
Those are some of the highlights, but, again,
this command contains a lot of subcommands as well
that will allow us to actually configure the setting
to allow us to have those localization settings.
The next command we're going to focus on is
the time-date control again,
but this time we'll use the subcommand, list timezones.
This is just going to give us a list
of all the time zones that's available on our Linux system,
and all this information can be stored
in a user share zone info folder.
Here we're going to use the subcommand, list timezones.
We're going to pipe it to the grep
and look for London since that was our target destination.
This is a quick way to look through the list
and see if it has exactly what we need to set up.
Okay, it looks like we found Euro London,
so let's go ahead and use that for our next input
on our time-date control, set timezone command.
And after we finish typing this,
we're going to look at our results.
So if you look here, you'll see
that the time zone has changed to Europe, London.
So that change went through successfully.
Now, if you look here, you'll see
that the local time and the UTC are one hour off.
That's because between the times of the end of March
and the last Sunday in October,
that's considered British summertime.
It's the same as UTC,
but the thing is, they adjust it by one hour,
depending on the time of the year.
And another thing to notice is the RTC time.
And that's the hardware clock that's used by the OS,
but most people today use NTP
for any type of synchronization,
and that's going to be Network Timing Protocol.
So with this locale control command,
what we're going to focus on here is
the system's current language locale
and the keyboard layout.
Now, if you see here on the system locale,
it describes the language and the encoding scheme,
which is the UTF-8.
Now that's the standard for most Linux systems,
so we're going to make sure we keep it that way.
The U.S., you see that for the keymaps,
because every keyboard isn't laid out the same.
Different regions have different types.
Even if they're a U.S.,
sometimes they could be slightly different.
Some keyboards have more keys than others, et cetera,
so this is a screen
that's going to give us all the information.
We'll go ahead and give a list
of those locales by using the list locale subcommand,
and we're going to look for the English Great Britain
with the UTF-8 encoding scheme
through the list that we have.
Okay, looks like we found it.
And again, if we ever need to search specifically,
we could use a forward slash command
and just type in exactly what we're looking for.
Next, we're going to look for the keymaps,
and we're going to look for the one specifically
for Great Britain, so the G.B.
Okay, we know Great Britain's going to be in there.
It's going to be towards the upper half,
but we're just going to give a look
at all the other options that we have
and just see the wide availability of these locale settings.
Okay, let's go ahead and put these words into action,
and we're going to set the locale for English Great Britain
using the UTF-8 encoding scheme,
and while we're at it, we're going to go ahead
and change the keymap settings as well to Great Britain.
So we look here, we'll see the system locale has changed
as well as the VC keymap has changed.
Now, if you're using a U.S. keyboard,
and you type the backslash in right now,
you should see a pound symbol or a hashtag,
but, I'm just letting you know if you want to check that out,
that'd be a great way to start.
Now I'm just about to go
through the process of reverting everything back,
just to make sure
I don't have any wonky things happen in the future,
but that sums up this walkthrough.
We just went through how to configure the locale settings
as well as the keymaps,
just went over a little information
about how those things work
and how to configure 'em on our Linux system,
and I'll see you in the next lesson.