Introduction

After installing a new Ubuntu system, I always set the language configuration to fit my local environment.

Locales configuration

Connect to a terminal of your machine and execute next command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

After this, you will see a list of languages and countries.

You have to select with space bar the language and country you need. In my case, as I live in Spain, I have selected es_ES.UTF-8. It is recommended to choose UTF-8 version.

Finally, Ubuntu will ask you to select the default language to use in the operating system.

Keyboard configuration

After that, you should configure the language in the keyboard with this command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Then you’ll have to select several options in a Menu.

  1. In the first window, I select Generic 105-Key PC

  2. The next step is to select the language, in my case, Spanish.

  3. We continue with the layout of the Keyboard, in my case, Spanish.

  4. AltGr key configuration: Right Alt (AltGr).

  5. And finally the Compose Key configuration: No compose Key.

Timezone configuration

Now, we will configure the timezone, with this command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

I will select the country (Europe) and the city (Madrid) where I live, so the timezone has been updated.

Reboot

Finally it is recommended to reboot the system to apply the changes.

sudo reboot

Check

Once rebooted, you can check the language has been updated.

# locale
LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="es_ES.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

And as it was expected, the language es_ES.UTF-8 is defined as default.