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Time Zone & Locale

Time zone

Use datetimectl to check which time zone your system is currently set to:

               Local time: Tue 2025-09-23 21:51:5220:04:39 CESTUTC
           Universal time: Tue 2025-09-23 19:51:5220:04:39 UTC
                 RTC time: Tue 2025-09-23 19:51:5220:04:39
                Time zone: Europe/BerlinUTC (CEST,UTC, +0200)0000)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

If the time zone doesn't match with the one you live in,in (e.g. if it says UTC), 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.

datetimectl set-timezone Europe/Berlin

Localization

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

nano /etc/locale.gen

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
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