Thunderbird Date Format

dotancohen · 10-14-2005, 12:10 AM

The Thunderbird mail client defaults to the mm/dd/yyyy date format. I
need to replace that with dd/mm/yyyy. I found the answer is to change
LC_TIME to my local setting (he_IL). But where is that stored? I
tried:
/etc/profile
~/profile
~/.profile
~/.bash_profile
~/.bashrc

and several others that turned up in searches. But none of them have
this setting. Where is it located in Fedora Core 4? Thank you.

Dotan Cohen
http://technology-sleuth.com

homey · 10-14-2005, 05:11 PM

If you run the command: timeconfig, it should put the correct info into /etc/sysconfig/i18n.
I don't know where else to look for where the system puts it.
You could put this into .bash_profile or maybe even just run the command:
export LC_TIME="he_IL.UTF.8"

This is what my FC4 box shows from the command: locale

Code:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
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=

and this is what my /etc/sysconfig/i18n looks like

Code:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"

dotancohen · 10-15-2005, 06:58 AM

Thanks, I don't know what solved it, but I updated /etc/sysconfig/i18n as root, and as user did:
$ export LANG="he_IL.UTF.8"
$ export LC_ALL="he_IL.UTF.8"

I then logged out and logged back in, and found dd/mm/yy dates in Thunderbird. Also, Firefox is now in Hebrew!!! Yes!!! Thanks!

Dotan Cohen
http://technology-sleuth.com/index.php

homey · 10-15-2005, 08:26 AM

Great!
I think that if you look at /etc/profile.d/lang.sh, it will try grab from /etc/sysconfig/i8n unless you use the export command. So, you got it for sure by updating i18n and running the export command.

dotancohen · 10-15-2005, 09:33 AM

This solution leads to two questions:
1) There is no way to update this on a user-by-user basis? All the users on any paticular machine must have the same setting?
2) This leaves us with the dd/mm/yy format. Is there no way to specify dd-mm-yyyy? Or even yyyy-mm-dd?

homey · 10-15-2005, 12:10 PM

Sorry, I don't know for either case but if you find out, let us know.

homey · 10-15-2005, 01:18 PM

Quote:

1) There is no way to update this on a user-by-user basis? All the users on any paticular machine must have the same setting?

Here's a possible work around for that. Maybe you could try it a see.
I put this little diddy at the bottom of /etc/bashrc

Code:

WHOAMI=`/usr/bin/whoami`
if [ $WHOAMI = "root" ]; then
export TZ="US/Eastern"
else
export TZ="US/Central"
fi

dotancohen · 10-15-2005, 01:30 PM

Very interesting! But it still requires root to do the work, each user cannot control her own settings. But you did a great job of identifying a problem and devising a creative solution. Good job.

Dotan Cohen
http://lyricslist.com

homey · 10-15-2005, 01:46 PM

Are there going to be a bunch of different timezones? Can't you have the users type it in based on what they want?
export TZ="US/Eastern"

dotancohen · 10-15-2005, 02:55 PM

Homey,
I think that I may have mislead you by accident. I needed this for my personal machine. The question as to whether or not individual users could set their own preference was purely hypothetical.

But thank you for for insight- I learned a little more as to the way my system works. And as we both know, that knowledge is valuable. Ignorant computer users are naive and dangerous computer users.

Dotan