In order to keep time properly, /etc/localtime must point to the correct time zone data file. Look around in /usr/share/zoneinfo/ and pick your timezone or a near-by big city.

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime
# date
Sun Feb 16 08:26:44 CET 2003

In most Gentoo Linux installations, your hardware clock is set to UTC (or GMT, Greenwich Mean Time) and then your timezone is taken into account to determine the actual, local time. If, for some reason, you need your hardware clock not to be in UTC, you will need to edit /etc/rc.conf and change the value of CLOCK from UTC to local.

(recommended:)
CLOCK="UTC"
(or:)
CLOCK="local"

A Locale is a set of information that most programs use for determining country and language specific settings. The locales and their data are part of the system library and can be found at /usr/share/locale on most systems. A locale name is generally named ab_CD where ab is your two (or three) letter language code (as specified in ISO-639) and CD is your two letter country code (as specified in ISO-3199).

Locale settings are stored in environment variables. These are typically set in the /etc/env.d/02locale (for system-wide settings) and ~/.bashrc (for user-specific settings) file. The variables controlling different aspects of locale settings are given in the table below, those with highest precedence (ie. those that override settings below them) are at the top of the table. All variables take one name of a locale in ab_CD format given above.

Most typically users only set the LANG variable and perhaps LC_CTYPE variable on user level by adding definitions to shells startup files defining the environment variable manually from command line:

export LANG="de_DE@euro"

For message based localization to work in programs that support it, you will probably need to have programs compiled with the nls (Native language support) USE flag set. Most of the programs using nls also need the gettext library to extract and use localized messages. Of course, Gentoo's Portage will automatically install it when needed.

If you use a locale that isn't available by default, you should use localedef to generate your locale. For instance:

# localedef -c -i en_US -f ISO-8859-15 en_US.ISO-8859-15

After having generated the locale, you can export the LANG variable as you see fit.

# export LANG="en_US.ISO-8859-15"

You will probably only use one or maybe two locales on your system. Up until now after compiling glibc a full set of all available locales has been created. As of now you can activate the userlocales USE flag and specify only the locales you will need in /etc/locales.build.

echo "sys-libs/glibc userlocales" >> /etc/portage/package.use

Now specify the locales you want to be able to use:

en_US/ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8/UTF-8
de_DE/ISO-8859-1
de_DE@euro/ISO-8859-15

The next step is to re-compile glibc. Of course you can defer this until the next glibc upgrade is available.

The keyboard layout used by the console is set in /etc/conf.d/keymaps by the KEYMAP variable. Valid values can be found in /usr/share/keymaps/{arch}/. i386 has further subdivisions into layout (qwerty/, azerty/, etc.). Some languages have multiple options, so you may wish to experiment to decide which one fits your needs best.

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

The keyboard layout to be used by the X server is specified in /etc/X11/xorg.conf by the XkbLayout option.

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

For KDE you have to install the kde-i18n package with the appropriate LINGUAS variable set:

# nano -w /etc/make.conf
(Add in the LINGUAS variable. For instance, for the German language:)
LINGUAS="de"

(Now install kde-i18n)
# emerge kde-i18n

In order to get your console to display the Euro symbol, you will need to set CONSOLEFONT in /etc/rc.conf to a file found in /usr/share/consolefonts/ (without the .psfu.gz). lat9w-16 has the Euro symbol.

CONSOLEFONT="lat9w-16"

Getting the Euro symbol to work properly in X is a little bit tougher. The first thing you should do is change the fixed and variable definitions in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias to end in iso8859-15 instead of iso8859-1.

fixed        -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-15
variable     -*-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15

Some applications use their own font, and you will have to tell them separately to use a font with the Euro symbol. You can do this at a user-specific level in .Xdefaults (you can copy this file to /etc/skel/ for use by new users), or at a global level for any application with a resource file in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/ (like xterm). In these files you generally have to change an existing line, rather than adding a new one. To change our xterm font, for instance:

(in your home directory)
# echo 'XTerm*font: fixed' >> .Xresources 
# xrdb -merge .Xresources

To use the Euro symbol in (X)Emacs, add the following to .Xdefaults:

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

For XEmacs (not plain Emacs), you have to do a little more. In /home/user/.xemacs/init.el, add:

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

Please note that this package now uses the LINGUAS variable to provide localization. The old LANGUAGE=ENUS|PORT system does not work anymore. The default language for OpenOffice.org is set as "US English". If you wish to change the default language for OpenOffice.org, check the ebuild for the default language code.

# nano -w /etc/make.conf
(Add in the LINGUAS variable. For instance, for the German language:)
LINGUAS="de"

(Now install openoffice)
# emerge openoffice