Use English with modern units, such as meters. Updated for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. English is the common language of computers. But why does it come with obsolete units, such as feet instead of meters?
English in Denmark en_DK.UTF-8 is the locale with English language and modern, metric units. It also uses ISO 8601 time, yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM.
This is an update to my 2008 article English in Finland on Ubuntu.
Prequisites: command line, sudo.
Generate Locale
You might have it already, but just to make sure:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales Generating locales... [..] en_DK.UTF-8... up-to-date [..] Generation complete.
As the locales are generated, you also see the list of what’s available. We want en_DK.UTF-8.
Set Default Locale
$ sudo update-locale en_DK.UTF-8
Fix Per User Locale
In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, locale settings are in a new place: ~/.pam_environment [1, 2].
$ nano .pam_environment
Write the new locale values, so you get a file like this
## ~/.pam_environment LANGUAGE=en_DK:en LANG=en_DK.UTF-8
Log off and log back on.
Open Thunderbird, and see dates in ISO 8601 biggest number first format: 2012-12-04 17:13. Welcome to modern units!
Administrivia
Tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Copyright 2012 Tero Karvinen.
Bugs: English in Denmark is not shown in LightDM login screen language list.
To be tested: paper size, paper size in Firefox.