As I'm a German I explain how to enable the german language. If you want another language, you just have to replace the german language code de with the corresponding code for your country, e.g. fr for France or es for Spain.

To enable the right timezone /etc/localtime should point to the appropriate file with the datas for your timezone. You will find those files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/.

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime

If your hardware clock is set to local time and not to GMT you have to correct the variable CLOCK in /etc/rc.conf.

 CLOCK="local"

Telling programms what language you prefer will be done with the environment variable LANG. If you want to set the language system-wide for all users you should export LANG in /etc/profile. If not, this can be done in through your private .bashrc in your home directory. You can find available languages in /usr/share/i18n/locales.

 export LANG="de_DE@euro"

The keyboard-layout for terminal sessions is set through KEYMAP in /etc/rc.conf. You will find the appropriate tables in /usr/share/keymaps. If you aren't using composed characters with tildes (e.g. õ), accent graph (e.g. è) or similar, you could use the nodeadkeys-variants. This will save you to enter a space after typing letters like ~.

 KEYMAP="de-latin1"
 # KEYMAP="de-latin1-nodeadkeys"

The keyboard-layout for the X server is set with the option XkbLayout in the file /etc/X11/XF86Config.

 Section "InputDevice"
     Identifier  "Keyboard1"
     ...
     Option "XkbLayout"    "de"
     # Option XkbVariant"  "nodeadkeys"
     ...

If you want to see the Euro character in a session without using X, you have to use a console font which contains it. The console font is set with CONSOLEFONT in /etc/rc.conf. Available fonts will be find in /usr/share/consolefonts.

 CONSOLEFONT="lat0-16"

Using the above settings and KDE you should already get the Euro character with Alt-Gr-E in all KDE-programs. Remaining the non-KDE-programs.

Unfortunately this is not as easy as the settings before. You have to set the right font for every single X-program. So I will just explain how to enable the Euro character for xterm and (X)Emacs. You can change the fonts for programs under X in your private .Xdefaults in your home directory. To enable it for other (new) users you could copy this file to /etc/skel.

Insert the following in your .Xdefaults:

 xterm*font: 7x13euro

For (X)Emacs you define the font in .Xdefaults as shown below:

 Emacs.default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15

If you are using XEmacs (not Emacs) you will have to tell him what to do with the EuroSign. This will be done through a definition in .xemacs/init.el in your home directory:

 (define-key global-map '(EuroSign) '[€])