Chapter 2. System Locale and Keyboard Configuration

The localectl command can be used to query and change the system locale and keyboard layout settings. To show the current settings, use the status option:

localectl status

~]$ localectl status
  System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    VC Keymap: us
   X11 Layout: n/a

To list all locales available for your system, type:

localectl list-locales

~]$ localectl list-locales | grep en_
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU
en_AU.iso88591
en_AU.utf8
en_BW
en_BW.iso88591
en_BW.utf8

output truncated

To set the default system locale, use the following command as root:

localectl set-locale LANG=locale

Replace locale with the locale name, found with the localectl list-locales command. The above syntax can also be used to configure parameters from Table 2.1, “Options configurable in /etc/locale.conf”.

~]# localectl set-locale LANG=en_GB.utf8

When Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed with the Red Hat Kickstart installation method, setting of the system locales might not be persistent after an upgrade of the operating system.

When the %packages section of the Kickstart file includes the --instLang option, the _install_langs RPM macro is set to the particular value for this installation, and the set of installed locales is adjusted accordingly. However, this adjustment affects only this installation, not subsequent upgrades. If an upgrade reinstalls the glibc package, the entire set of locales is upgraded instead of only the locales you requested during the installation.

To avoid this, make the choice of locales permanent. You have these options:

As mentioned before, you can check your current keyboard layout configuration with the following command:

localectl status

~]$ localectl status
  System Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8
    VC Keymap: us
   X11 Layout: us

To list all available keyboard layouts that can be configured on your system, type:

localectl list-keymaps

~]$ localectl list-keymaps | grep cz
cz
cz-cp1250
cz-lat2
cz-lat2-prog
cz-qwerty
cz-us-qwertz
sunt5-cz-us
sunt5-us-cz

To set the default keyboard layout for your system, use the following command as root:

localectl set-keymap map

Replace map with the name of the keymap taken from the output of the localectl list-keymaps command. Unless the --no-convert option is passed, the selected setting is also applied to the default keyboard mapping of the X11 window system, after converting it to the closest matching X11 keyboard mapping. This also applies in reverse, you can specify both keymaps with the following command as root:

localectl set-x11-keymap map

If you want your X11 layout to differ from the console layout, use the --no-convert option.

localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap map

With this option, the X11 keymap is specified without changing the previous console layout setting.

~]# localectl --no-convert set-x11-keymap de

~]$ localectl status
  System Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
    VC Keymap: us
   X11 Layout: de

Apart from keyboard layout (map), three other options can be specified:

localectl set-x11-keymap map model variant options

Replace model with the keyboard model name, variant and options with keyboard variant and option components, which can be used to enhance the keyboard behavior. These options are not set by default. For more information on X11 Model, X11 Variant, and X11 Options see the kbd(4) man page.