If you need to change the language and keyboard configuration, follow these instructions:

Language configuration

First install the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install locales localeconf

When configuring the packages, you'll be asked a series of questions, but the most important are:

Select supported locales:

Select your language and its encoding. The encoding is how characters will be treated by the operating system. A good rule is to choose utf-8 locales.

For example, for my machine I chose: en_US.utf-8 and pt_PT.utf-8

Manage configuration with debconf:

Unless you're familiar with editing configuration files by hand, choose yes.

Default system locale:

If you prefer to have an English user interface, choose (like I did) en_US.utf-8, otherwise choose the language you selected during the supported locales configuration.

Settings to override:

This is where things get a little tricky. For example, I want my text to be "treated" with the Portuguese layout and also to use our national numeric and date formats, but the rest to be plain english, so I chose to override the LC_COLLATE, LC_CTYPE, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC and LC_DATE settings.

The following steps involve choosing the locale to apply to the settings you chose to override. In my system, I chose pt_PT.utf-8.

After the install system has finished setting up your locales, you're done. The next time you reboot you're system your new preferences will be applied. If you ever need to change this, execute the command:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure localeconf

Keyboard configuration - console

To configure your console keyboard layout, install the following package:

$ sudo apt-get install console-data

If the package console-data is already installed, use the following command instead

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-data

When the configuration dialog is displayed, choose to select a keymap from the "arch list".

The most tipical keyboard layout is "qwerty" (look at the first row of letters in your keyboard) so choose this unless you have something different.

Next, select a keyboard layout. My keyboard has a Portuguese layout so I chose that.

In case you're also choosing a Portuguese layout, when asked about a specific keymap, select the "Standard" option. I haven't looked into other options so this may vary a little bit for your configuration.

Press OK and you're done. Reboot your computer to use your new keyboard layout.

Keyboard configuration - Desktop

The easiest way to switch to a new layout in your Desktop Environment is to click Computer/Desktop Preferences/Keyboard Preferences.

On the Layouts pane, remove the currently selected layout and choose your prefered layout from the list on the right side on the pane.

Press the Close button and logout. When you login again, you should be using your selected keyboard layout.

Note: if you have a Microsoft keyboard (one with a Windows key in between the left Ctrl and Alt keys), and you want to use that extra key, on the Layouts pane select the "Generic 105-key PC" layout and in the Layout Options pane select the "Super is mapped to the Win-keys" option from the Available Options-Alt/Win key behaviour list.

From PeterParkkali Mon Feb 28 00:48:47 +0000 2005 From: Peter Parkkali Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:48:47 +0000 Subject: Language reconfiguration Message-ID: <20050228004847+0000@https://www.ubuntulinux.org&gt; The "Default system locale" setting seems to be managed by 'locales' package, so the I think a more thorough reconfiguration command would be $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales localeconf Or even {[[ $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales localeconf }}} to make sure it asks everything.

From PeterParkkali Mon Feb 28 02:13:29 +0000 2005 From: Peter Parkkali Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 02:13:29 +0000 Subject: Per-user language selection? Message-ID: <20050228021329+0000@https://www.ubuntulinux.org&gt; Hmm, is it possible for users to choose their own $LANG and $LC_* values? Setting them in ~/.profile and ~/.bash* probably won't help, as they affect only CLIs.

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