Date display in Thunderbird

kbcnetau · 04-07-2005, 02:54 AM

Does anyone know how -if it is possible - to change the date format in Thunderbird?

Currently, everything is coming out in US format - highly confusing to a European like me ;-)

What I would like is to set it per ISO8601 (yyyy-mm-dd).

I'm quite happy to hack files in my .thunderbird directory if required, but am not really prepared to re-compile just to fix something that I feel should be under 'Preferences'...

Cheers

Matthew

Randall Slack · 04-07-2005, 08:28 PM

Hi Kbc,

i've been looking for the same thing a while ago when using it on windows, and found out (at that time), that it wasn't possible from within thunderbird.
Thunderbird uses the default settings of your OS, when simply changing the date and time format of your OS, thunderbird will coppy this.

Please note this was with Thunderbird 1.0 under windows. but maybe you can try to look in that direction.

kbcnetau · 04-08-2005, 05:31 AM

Hi Randall

Thanks for that idea; I've checked the date/time settings, which are for Australia - same format as Europe.

The must have put it somewhere else in the Linux version - maybe I will have to compile my own after all

Cheers

Matthew

Randall Slack · 04-08-2005, 07:27 AM

Hi kbc,

sorry to hear it doesn't work, i'm planning to use thunderbird on my linux as well, so i'm afraid i'll bump into the same problem. in case you find an answer, i'd be happy to hear it.

cathectic · 04-08-2005, 08:45 AM

To get round it, I added this to /etc/profile (or you could add it to ~/.profile):

Code:

export LC_ALL=en_GB

although

Code:

export LC_TIME=en_GB

would I believe have the same effect.

(In the case of Australia, the correct setting is "en_AU". 'locale -a | egrep "en*"' will give you a full list of all locales for English speaking countries. 'locale' will display your current locale settings).

Edit

Randall - for the Netherlands, the correct locale is nl_NL. In Slack, you can either edit /etc/profile, or edit both /etc/profile.d/lang.sh and /etc/profile.d/lang.csh

kbcnetau · 04-08-2005, 08:27 PM

Thanks Carlos!

I've had a poke around - SuSE users (on 9.0 at least) can set these in /etc/sysconfig/language and run SuSEconfig.

It's opened up a can of worms for me - I'm now looking to have to create my own locale to get my desired (ISO) date format into my (en-AU.UTF8) locale - all good fun!

Cheers

Matthew