Time Zone & Locale

Time zone

~~Create~~Use ~~a symbolic link~~datetimectl to ~~your~~check ~~local~~which time zone atyour system is currently set to:

/etc/localtime               Local time: Tue 2025-09-23 21:51:52 CEST
           Universal time: Tue 2025-09-23 19:51:52 UTC
                 RTC time: Tue 2025-09-23 19:51:52
                Time zone: Europe/Berlin (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

~~and sync~~

If the time zone doesn't match with the ~~local~~one ~~hardware~~you ~~clock:~~live in, use the set-timezone command to change it:

NOTE: To list all available time zones, use the list-timezones command. Search for town names with / (search is case-sensitive). Alternatively, there's a website to help you pick the correct one by country.

lndatetimectl -sfset-timezone /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime
hwclock --systohc

Localization

Edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 and other desired locales (prefer UTF-8):

nano /etc/locale.gen

NOTE: You can search in nano using CTRL + W.

Generate the locales by running:

locale-gen

Set which locales and keyboard layout the system should use for messages and documentation (man pages):

echo "LANG=de_DE.UTF-8" > /etc/locale.conf
echo "KEYMAP=de-latin1" > /etc/vconsole.conf