Ubuntu installation defaults to US date format

Linux Support
1

Dell Latitude E5570 running Ubuntu 24.04

Following a recent collection of odd behaviours I re-installed Ubuntu and all my files. The installation went smoothly. The only problem I’ve found since then is a very annoying one: all dates are in USA format of mm/dd/yy rather than the desired UK format of dd/mm/yy.

It first came to light in Thunderbird where I discovered that the format is inherited from the system-defined format. So I went to Settings where one can specify the date and time (but not the format) and 24hr or am/pm format. The latter has no effect and am/pm is shown in the top bar (Classic View).
Later I found that LibreOffice is similarly afflicted and formatting a cell to UK time format has a variable behaviour.

It may be that I missed some change to the installation process whereby I needed to specify UK format but nothing that I do seems able to change it now.
My question: Is there a way of changing the global time format or must I re-install Ubuntu?

Thanks

2

Ok, so there are two things you may one to check, both of these run at system level, but UI environments should all take their lead from the system so this should work across all desktop environments.

  • timezone, not your specific issue but worth checking given your locale seems wrong
  • locale, typically controls default number and date formatting

TimeZones

$ timedatectl 
               Local time: Sat 2025-02-08 13:19:04 GMT
           Universal time: Sat 2025-02-08 13:19:04 UTC
                 RTC time: Sat 2025-02-08 13:19:04
                Time zone: Europe/London (GMT, +0000)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

If your time zone isn’t “Europe/London” (and you are physically in the UK) you will want to change this so your clock works properly with daylight savings.

$ timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London

Locales

$ localectl
System Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
    VC Keymap: (unset)         
   X11 Layout: gb
    X11 Model: pc105

If your system locale is different to this, that’s likely your problem.

$ localectl set-locale en_GB.UTF-8

Checking

You can check this and the persistence with;

$ cat /etc/timezone
Europe/London

$ ls -la /etc/localtime 
/etc/localtime -> /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London

My guess would be you didn’t select country codes etc when doing the installation, which in turn sets up the default system locale … which I’m guessing is set to “LANG=en_US.UTF-8” (or similar)?

3

Your assessment was correct and the command localectl set-locale en_GB.UTF-8 worked a treat! Everything is back to “normal” now.

Many thanks for sorting this out - and so quickly/easily. It must be really good to know what you are doing!

Keith

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