[SOLVED] Date setting

[Klaas Vaak]

1 week ago I installed Mate 18.3 in Virtual Box. I was able to change the date format in the bottom right corner, but the date format in Thunderbird did not react. I understand that Thunderbird's date format depends on the Linux date format.
Can someone tell me how to get the same date format in Thunderbird as in Linux?

[catweazel]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunde ... onfigdate/

[Klaas Vaak]

Thanks Catweazel, I had seen those 2 things too but they don't work, they don't support yyyy-mm-dd as in 2018-02-17.
From what I understand about Linux is that this is not a Thunderbird issue but is controlled by the regional settings, like in Windows.
My regional settings in Linux are done, as shown in the date in the bottom right corner: yyyy-mm-dd, but Thunderbird has not "complied".

[MrEen]

From catweazel's first link:

Code: Select all

In Linux, these settings are based on your locale. 
If the environment variable "LANG" is set to "en_US", for example, Thunderbird will show the date in "MM/DD/YYYY" format. 
To override the locale only for showing dates, set the "LC_TIME" environment variable (for example, "LC_TIME=en_GB"). 
If you want the ISO 8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD), use the "en_DK" locale. 

[Klaas Vaak]

From catweazel's first link:

Code: Select all

In Linux, these settings are based on your locale. 
If the environment variable "LANG" is set to "en_US", for example, Thunderbird will show the date in "MM/DD/YYYY" format. 
To override the locale only for showing dates, set the "LC_TIME" environment variable (for example, "LC_TIME=en_GB"). 
If you want the ISO 8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD), use the "en_DK" locale. 

Thanks Mr Een. Can you please tell me how I can get into the "locale" and/or how to change the "LANG" to "en_DK"?
The reason I ask this is that I am a 10-day young newbie

[MrEen]

From searching I found 2 ways to achieve this.

1.https://askubuntu.com/questions/918973/ ... efault-for has instructions just below "2 Answers" if your system uses US english.

2. https://ccollins.wordpress.com/2009/01/ ... on-ubuntu/ gives a very thorough way that prevents possibly changing language for month and day names. From the date in the URL this is quite old, but I think it would still work. You might need to change the use of gedit to whatever text editor you use. This one may be too difficult for a newbie.

You might want to wait for a more experienced user to offer further suggestions as these are not things I have done myself.

Good luck, and welcome to the forum!

[Klaas Vaak]

Many thanks for your help.

Using your solution 1 and with the "en_DK" locale I managed to get to get Thunderbird to display the dd/mm/yy format, which is better than mm/dd/yyyy, but it still not optimal. I'll keep looking.