Change the Week Start Day in Ubuntu

A while back I showed how to change the week start day in the Hamster Applet time tracker. Today I'm going to show how to change the week start day to Monday for Ubuntu in general. This will affect various applications in Ubuntu including the default clock applet on the panel. I figured some of this out by reading this post on the Ubuntu forums.

The time and date formats in Ubuntu are controlled by the locale settings. First you need to find out the current locale being used to control your time and date settings. Open a terminal and enter the following command.

You should see a result that looks something like

which in my case is English US.

Now you're ready to make your adjustments. Change to the locale directory and copy the current locale file to create a new custom file.

Adjust the above copy command for your locale that you found in the previous step.

Now edit the new custom file.

Find the line that says

and change it to

then save the file and close the editor.
The final step is to make the change in /etc/environment to point to your new custom file.

Add a line like this to the bottom of the file making sure to adjust it for the custom locale file you want to use.

That's it. Log out and log back in and you should see the change in the panel calendar and other applications such as Evolution.

GNOME Calendar Start on Monday

Comments

10 Responses to “Change the Week Start Day in Ubuntu”

1. Fer says:

   April 29, 2009 at 11:02 AM

   Sorry commenting out of subject, but I could't find a "contact" link.
   In past December you posted about how to "Change the Week Start Day in Ubuntu". It is not working for me in Jaunty. Does it change something from Hardy or I'm doing something wrong? Did you try in Jaunty? Same way? Thanks a lot.

   Reply
2. Linerd says:

   April 29, 2009 at 11:27 AM

   Fer - I have not tried this yet in Jaunty. I'll try to take a look at it tonight and see what's going on.

   Reply
3. Linerd says:

   April 30, 2009 at 8:05 PM

   Fer - I just tried this on Jaunty and it worked for me. My computer has been upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 to 9.04. I don't know if it would be different on a fresh install.

   My /etc/environment file looks like this:
   PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
   LC_TIME=”en_US_custom.UTF-8?

   Reply
4. Fer says:

   April 30, 2009 at 8:34 PM

   Ohhh I forgot to change my /etc/environment
   That did the trick.

   By the way, during the search I also found that editing the file /etc/defaults/locale this way (adding the last three lines):
   
$ sudo gedit /etc/default/locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"

   I will get American english, but time, paper size and units in British i.e. weeks starting with Mondays, A4, metric.
   (In this case is not necessary edit the /etc/environment)

   Thanks a lot

   Reply
5. Denis says:

   November 2, 2009 at 5:56 PM

   In 9.10 do not change environment OR /etc/defaults/locale
   For example ccsm will not run after that !!!

   After you change and save:

   first_weekday 2

   run in terminal

   sudo locale-gen

   then log out and log in

   Wollaaaa

   Reply
6. arielCo says:

   November 29, 2009 at 12:43 AM

   Editing /etc/default/locale worked perfectly for me.
   @Denis: maybe you did the same mistake as I - the quotation marks shown in Fer's comment are "typographical", as opposed to "standard" plain old quotes (ASCII 34); I blame WordPress. If you copied from the browser and pasted, the locale variables will include the funny characters and for example "cal" will say:
   cal: setlocale: No such file or directory

   I ran "sudo vi /etc/default/locale", replaced the quotes (in this particular case the quotes aren't even needed), logged out/in, and everything's peachy.

   Reply
7. peter says:

   December 4, 2009 at 5:38 PM

   thanks for the tutorial.
   there is just one minor issue - it is unable to start NetBeans (v6.7.1) after the path to LC_TIME is changed to a custom file.

   Reply
8. Mike says:

   January 8, 2010 at 2:59 AM

   This didn't work for me at all.

   I tried changing it in /etc/environment and in /etc/default/locale, and neither worked.

   I also tried the locale-gen trick mentioned above, but that failed too.

   At one point, the change had been made, but Firefox complained about an unknown locale, and wouldn't start. Undoing the changes fixed the problem.

   This really ought to be easy.

   Reply
9. re??is says:

   September 22, 2011 at 4:41 AM

   I followed the instructions in this post and rebooted, but Sunday was still displayed as the first day of the week, and now manual pages don't display certain characters correctly and man(1) shows this error:

   man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct

   Total fail.

   Reply
10. Jimmy says:

    October 31, 2011 at 6:04 AM

    OMG!! - Ubuntu is destroying the spirit of the well constructed shell

    Reply