Configuring Network Connections
Christine Bresnahan, Richard A. Blum · 2019
This chapter walks through how to configure your Linux system to blend in with the local environment where it's running. First, the chapter discusses how Linux handles different language characters, including how it formats monetary values. Then it moves on to how Linux handles times and dates as used in different countries. The world is full of different languages. Not only does each country have its own language (or sometimes, sets of languages), each country has its own way for people to write numerical values, monetary values, and the time and date. For a Linux system to be useful in any specific location, it must adapt to the local way of doing all those things. Localization is the ability to adapt a Linux system to a specific locale. To accomplish this, the Linux system must have a way to identify how to handle the characters contained in the local language. Linux stores locale information in a special set of environment variables. Programs that need to determine the locale of the Linux system just need to retrieve the appropriate environment variable to see what character set to use. The date and time associated with a Linux system are crucial to the proper operation of the system. Linux uses the date and time to keep track of running processes, to know when to start or stop jobs, and in logging important events that occur. Having your Linux system coordinated with the correct time and date for your location is a must.