Localization

This article describes the localization (abbreviated L10N) and internationalization (abbreviated I18N) of software.

Locale
The locale defines your language, country and any special variant preferences. You find possible locales in. E.g. for Germany choose  . A UTF-8 based locale is strongly recommended.

Kernel
You need to activate the following kernel options:

Generate locales
Add your locales to (optional: delete all other locales):

Afterwards run locale-gen to generate the locales. locale -a lists all installed locales.

Use locales
Use eselect locale or manually add your locale to so the system uses the locale:

To apply the changes run:

locale now shows your locale.

USE flag
Portage knows the global USE flag nls for enabling support for localization in other packages (default for almost all profiles). Also set the Linguas variable to only support only your language, e.g. for German:

After setting this you want to update your system so the changes take effect:

Console font
Change your, e.g. for German:

Keyboard layout
Change your, e.g. for German:

Timezone
Set your timezone, e.g. for Germany:

Change your to the same timezone:

X.Org
See the evdev article.

KDE
See the KDE article.

Input methods
To type non-Western scripts, you may need to use an input method.