How to change character collation in GNOME2 session?

[HTD]

Exactly: seems easy to find, but no luck so far. I remember I've changed in on Ubuntu, but from the other hand - I don't really remember how.

You'll find it everywhere - LC_COLLATE="...", export LC_COLLATE, yes, but it works only from shell, and only for shell apps. GNOME seems to ignore it.

What's the deal with this collation? Since very old times, Amiga SD floppies - I used "_" and "!" on beginning of directory to make it displayed first. Fast, convenient, life-saver sometimes. But not any more, not in GNOME. There is this STUPID collation which makes "!zed" listed after "zac" which is real PITA for me. Enough - LC_COLLATE="C" and all works as expected. But how? I tried to add it to /etc/init.d before GDM loads, to ~/.rcdm /.bash_profile. No effect. GNOME ignores LC_ variables, I think it overwrites them per user or session from... I don't know where.

BTW, I don't want to change other locale settings, or displayed language. That's what LC_ variables are for. I know Nautilus respect LC_ settings and uses LC_COLLATE for sorting.

Sorting in Nautilus was often reported as bug, which made its developers pissed - well, I don't blame them - why add manual configuration when Nautilus is a part of GNOME and uses its system settings? Anyway, how to change them? I mean permanently, I want my "!" and "_" directories on top! And yes, I've searched the friendly Google. None of the things I've found worked.

[xenopeek]

Put this in the /etc/default/locale file. Make sure the LC_ALL is not set in that file, in /etc/bash.bashrc, in ~./bashrc, in /etc/profile or in ~/.bash_profile, as it can't be overridden later on and will block your attempts to change LC_COLLATE.

And note that it's recommended to explicitly set LC_COLLATE to C when dealing with system-wide settings, as some programs are written in such a way that they expect traditional English ordering of the alphabet.

[HTD]

Setting LC_COLLATE to "C" is exactly what I intended to do.
I've added it to some places and there's no need to remove them.
Except one place - I've added LC_COLLATE="C" to .gtkrc-2.0 and it helped. After further investigation - it helped because it caused error in GTK locale functions making them switch to "C". "Expecting integer" - error message said, so how about zero? LC_COLLATE=0 - and well, no error messages. So I tested it with gnome-terminal - again - works as charm.

Well, I'm not too happy it places capital letters on top, but is there a way to do it right?

The most logical and intuitive way of sorting files would be something like this:

!
_
.
0
1
ajax
JS
php

Main problem with such changes is they are lost after new installation. Is there a program to list all user customizations? I change a lot in my system. Theoretically - if something in /etc is not installed from a Debian package - it's user's... But how to check it quick? From the other hand - if something is in ~ it's most likely user's, but most of ~/.dotfiles are generated by programs. Some of them are modified by user manually - and those are the interesting ones to backup. Oh, and gconf data... everything which is not default.