I want my programs to show the date as DD-MM-YY. I’ve found how to set the Calendar specifically.
In Language, I’ve changed the Language and Region to UK, but in Thunderbird Lightning for example, it shows the date now as DD/MM/YY. How can I set the system to change the date separator?

In Windows I can customise the date in Control Panel by going to Region & Language>Formats>Additional Settings>Date.
This allows me to set the date separator as “-” and not”/”.
I can’t yet see how to do this in Mint.

You will need to change the LC_TIME environment variable to one that has the format you require. en_AU.UTF-8 might do the trick.

See here for more info on environment variables - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables. In order to make the change "stick" for you as a user, insert it into ~/.profile (it's mentioned in that link).

Note that it is up to each application whether or not they respect the system locale. Thunderbird does however: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format

Thank you for replying, I really appreciate it.

Is there some way to do this through the Menu and the settings?
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I have no understanding of the the link you very kindly provided. I could read it ten more times and it just means nothing to me, it might as well be in Greek or Latin! No disrespect to you.

The terminal thing just scares the crap out of me as having no understanding of it at all, I'm scared stiff I'll type something wrong and screw the whole system up.
As an absolute Linux beginner it's very daunting to me. If it was something I could do in the settings windows I could cope with that, as I can see what to do and it shows it in a straightforward way. That was how I managed to explain how I did it in Windows 7, in the hope there was some way to do it the same in Mint?

Ah, sorry paxolin. I don't think it can be done through the GUI, but hopefully someone else will prove me wrong or find an easier way to achieve what you want to do without using the command line (don't be nervous of the terminal, it's not that bad and often gets used in Windows too).

The first thing that the third party will have to do though is find a locale that definitely has LC_TIME the way you want it (the Australian one was a guess as I can't seem to find a good list of locale contents on the web). Saving that, you could create your own definition of LC_TIME or even your own locale, but that is a bit more complicated.

My apologies again. Don't give up though, hopefully someone will come along soon with a solution for you.

Just a quick rundown on environmental variables. They are variables which "follow you around" as it were. Any program or script that you run can access, use and modify them. By convention, they always have upper-case names. Some are set up for you automatically by the system. For example HOME is your home folder (think My Documents) and USER is your user name. Others you can create for yourself, as many as you like. The LC variables are standard and are used to specify national defaults such as language, currency, date format, and so on.

You don't usually need to use the terminal until you feel ready to. And you really don't need to be scared of screwing up. As long as you go exploring as yourself and not as root, you can't do your system any damage.

Thanks for your informative post. I really need to find out more about this terminal & command line stuff, although I think it's something that I'll get the hang of only over time. I am sometimes 'hard of learning'!
This 'root' thing: As I'm the only user on my system, doesn't that mean I must have all the admin rights? Or am I getting it mixed up with root? Is that not the same? Must be my 'hard of learning' syndrome kicking in there...

Mint, like Ubuntu, grants full sudo rights to the first registered user. Sudo is a program which lets you carry out a single command as root without knowing the root password; instead you give your own. If that's what you mean by being an administrative user, then you are one, but only when you explicitly preface the command with sudo. Otherwise you are just yourself and have no superpowers. A file called /etc/sudoers, which only root has access to, controls who is allowed to use sudo and under what conditions.

I don't know if Mint gives you a separate root account in addition to sudo. Ubuntu doesn't; it's sudo or nothing! But when anyone on this forum talks about doing something as root, that always includes using sudo.

1 members found this post helpful.

On Mint, when you do anything, including issuing commands on the terminal, you do it by default as an ordinary user. This means effectively that you can't make any changes to or do any damage to the system.

However, if you prefix any command on the terminal with sudo, and enter your own password (the one you use to log in), you are now acting as the administrator (which we call the root user), meaning that you can make changes to the system.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for these latest posts.
I did start to read a Linux Mint Cinnamon guide, but that does seem to go into it as if you understand about Linux to start with.

Although I’ve used only Windows for decades, for me, learning a new OS is not the same as increasing your knowledge of an existing one. I can use the Windows dosbox quite reasonably - tracert to check the route to a domain, or ipconfig to see how the system has been configured, for example.

The 'sudo' command I've seen mentioned before in other posts, without me understanding the meaning of it.
I’m just starting to look at Linux for Dummies. I hope that it explains things more basically.
Anyway thanks again for the encouragement.

That's the most important thing you need to know. It's true for everyone, not just for you. But a lot of people never get it.
Think of the Linux shell (command line) as rather like a souped-up version of DOS. It's much more powerful but it's not all that different until you start writing scripts. Many of the commands are quite similar (for example ipconfig becomes ifconfig).

At this rate you won't be a dummy for long!

what I wanted to add: do not expect any windows related dialog/settings/tool/whatever exist on linux. Probably there is something similar, but probably you will not find anything, because it is solved quite differently.
As an example: type and cat do different things on dos and linux.

Linux is basically driven by text files, so called config files (often they are named like something.conf), there is no registry. Therefore if you want to change such kind of settings, you may need to find the appropriate file and location and need to edit that text file. Sometimes you can find a gui to do the same job, but this is not a general rule. And especially in your case there is no such gui (at least I don't know about that).

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi paxolin, I've found an easy-ish way to achieve what you want to do. It requires some command line work but I can walk you through that.

If you're up for it, please let me know and post here the output from the command locale (to copy text from the terminal window, highlight it then right-click->Copy). That will allow us to see which locale you are currently using.

Thanks for this. I hope it is an easy-ish way - for my sake!
Also thanks for explaining clearly in detail what I needed to do the get you the locale info. I followed your instructions, here's the result:

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

Even I can see it's confirming I'm (allegedly) in the UK, although I live in Thailand.

One of the reasons for this is Windows thinking it's so clever, that it keeps giving me pages in Thai for update details, web page results, etc. Therefore I have to set my Windows locale to UK to keep it in English, and Mint the same, as otherwise when I re-boot, the time-zone and sometimes therefore the date will change.
When I was trying Mint 17, it kept the time synchronised OK, but for some reason since having installed Mint 18, that has also got screwed up and often both or either Windows/Mint will synch to UK time, whereas before they didn't, meaning I have to reset the time. That's a side-track at this point though.

Thanks. Good stuff.

Ok, note number 1 is that if you are pasting output or code here, it's best to highlight it and click on the # symbol in the advanced edit menu. My fault, I forgot to say that. That puts CODE tags around the text and keeps it cleaner. It doesn't make much difference in this case but it may in the future if you're pasting more complicated info.

So you are ok keeping UK English? If so, that suits me, as being from these isles, that is what I have set up too.

The time synchronisation problem is as you say a separate issue, so you should open up a new thread for it (but it's perhaps best to wait until you have this one out the way first).

Some background. All the locales on your system are kept in the system directory /usr/share/i18n/locales.

To see a list of these, type ls /usr/share/i18n/locales on the command line. Note that to copy a command from here (or any text source) to your command line, first highlight the text here and right-click->Copy. Then go to the command line and press the keys (all at the same time) Ctrl-Shift-V (this is the same as right-click->Paste).

I'll leave you to do that. Once you're comfortable with copying/pasting, we'll carry on.

Okey kokey, I've managed to follow that fine, thanks. Assuming you didn't want me to past the results here - or did you? It's fairly long, although I can see, if it's relevant:
#en_GB#